You need to make sure that the shell sees the "scotts test" and "type me" as one name each, and not parse the space in between as a seperator. Conversely, the space before your argument should be parsed as a separator:

use strict;
my $command='c:\"scotts test"\"type me";
my $argument='c:\"this is a"\"multi word argument"';
print $command." ".$argument;
__END__
c:\"scotts test"\"type me" c:\"this is a"\"multi word argument"
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If you replace the print by a call to system(), that should do the trick. It's been a couple of years since I've done anything on the Windows command line, so I might be wrong in my quoting syntax, which would kind of defeat the entire purpose of this post, but there you go :)

CU
Robartes-