And this is why you should be thankful that system() and qx() use only /bin/sh and never "the user's preferred shell", because /bin/csh cannot quote all possible strings. I can't recall the combo you can't get now, but I think it's a backslash followed by a newline that cannot be quoted, because one backslash and a newline just creates a newline, but two backslashes and a newline creates two backslashes and a newline, or something like that.