Okay, I even went out of my way and renamed some things so that I had spaces in my path but that didn't change my results. This type of stuff has changed between versions of Perl so perhaps that explains our different results. I was doing this testing using v5.6.0 ActivePerl build 616.

I suspect that Perl's 'if CreateProcess() fails, then just retry with CreateProcess("cmd.exe","/c ...",...)' logic is masking the real error here. I'd think that using an indirect object with system would disable that logic, but I haven't checked that.

In any case, you can always do: 

use Win32;
$vss= Win32::GetShortPathName( "D:\\Program Files\\"
    . "Microsoft Visual Studio\\Common\\VSS\\win32\\ss.exe");

[download]
and I'm pretty sure that will fix errors due to spaces in file names.

You also might want to try Win32::Process to see if you can reproduce why Perl thinks CreateProcess() is failing.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re2: 'system' not working! by tye
in thread 'system' not working! by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.