Greetings.

I've run into a strange situation with file names containing multiple consecutive spaces passed through a piped open call. The platform I'm testing on (and the target running environment) is Perl 5.6.1 (ActiveState) Win32 build running on a Win2K server. The problem can be demonstrated with the below sample: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $filename = 'This_filename_has_2  2_spaces.txt';
my $tempstr = "echo \"$filename\" |";
printf "Below is the output of \'$tempstr\'\n";
open (IN,$tempstr) or die "Failed to echo $filename!\n";
printf "\t";
printf <IN>;
close (IN);

[download]
The output looks like: 
Below is the output of 'echo "This_filename_has_2  2_spaces.txt" |'
        This_filename_has_2 2_spaces.txt

[download]

The output of the first print statement maintains the two spaces in the filename, but the response from the echo has condensed it to a single space. Same thing happens with multiple spaces.

I've tried different quote delimeters, as well as using sysopen (which I couldn't figure out how to use as a pipe in this same way). The escaped double quotes on the filename are needed for real external calls like md5sum.exe, since it's Win32. I'm wondering if this is a quirk of the Win32 environment, or if this happens elsewhere as well. Suggestions?

In reply to consecutive spaces in piped open by Woodya

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