here's what finally worked. For those of you using windows perl, or windows in general. this cmd /c start diddy, opens the file with its associated program, so kinda handy thing to know if you're confined to windows. forgive me for posting this crappy vb code. but if you're interested I hope it helps you out. The most idiotic part as you can see is its quoting... having to use ansi chr(x) to represent double quotes while using double quotes in the same string... bad form...... tisk tisk...

Dim command As String
Dim file As String

file = "X:\xxx.pl"
command = "CMD /C START " & Chr(34) & Chr(34) & " " & Chr(34) & file &
+ Chr(34)

Shell command
[download]