At the shell, I can do either of the following to get exactly the same results: 
ls -l simple.pl

[download]

OR

ls -l "simple.pl"

[download]

The only difference being that I decided to quote the argument to ls.

Now, emulating my first shell command with the Perl system cmd is straightforward: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5

use strict;

my $file = 'simple.pl'; # the program being run!

my @syscmd = ('ls' , '-l', $file);

warn "@syscmd";
system @syscmd;

[download]

However, when attempting to emulate the second shell command Perl does something to preserve the quotes and make it a literal filename and thus the file "simple.pl" is not found.

So, the question becomes how does one emulate the second shell command that I issued from the shell using Perl's system command?

In reply to Quoting arguments to system by princepawn

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