Besides that, Windows doesn't provide anything like the Unix execve(2) syscall accepting an array of arguments. Instead, if has functions as CreateProcess which take the full command line as a single argument. When perl runs a multi-argument system call, it has to quote and join the arguments into a single line.

Unfortunately, in Windows the command line parsing is handled by the application itself and so there isn't a unique and standard set of quoting rules as different language runtimes use slightly different sets of rules and so, there are corner cases where perl may fail to quote command arguments properly. That has security implications too.

See for instance How a Windows program splits its command line into individual arguments.

Note that I am not advocating against the use of using the multi-argument system and related builtins on Windows, just pointing out that things are not straightforward as when using them on Linux or UNIX systems.

In reply to Re^3: system call windows by salva
in thread system call windows by Anonymous Monk

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