Recall that system() behaves differently with one argument than it does with multiple. Perl treats a single argument as though it were a shell command, scanning for and processing shell metacharacters. Having played with it a bit, I'm not 100% convinced that on NT it behaves as one would expect it to coming from Unix.

Does 

system("at", "12:00", "program.exe", '"the.server.org:1234"');
work any better for you?

In reply to Re: Quote marks lost in system() calls by dws
in thread Quote marks lost in system() calls by Three-G

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