Hi,
This isn't a bug in Perl, it's a Win32 problem. a "String" in the Win32 world is (up to) 255 characters terminated by \0 (as in a C string). You'll find this is a limitation of a "Text" field in MS Access, too.

You can also demonstrate this "environment variable feature" in IIS if you enter a key=value in a query string where the value has more than 255 characters... it gets chopped and Env variables get stuck in... Neat!

HTH - Mark