For best practice, you'll always want to keep your arguments in array-form. For instance, keep @ARGV as-is, and pass it to system, exec, open, etc. as a LIST. This will ensure you're handling arguments correctly. You'll find that any other way is less-than-ideal and prone to problems.

With that said, let's say you already have your arguments as a string. To emulate shell parsing, in order to get back an array of arguments:
use Text::ParseWords; # core module

my $args = q(-w 70 -c 80 -r 'bla bla');

my @ARGS = shellwords($args);

# this is how to keep single-quotes
# [but it's probably not what you want for open()]

my @ARGS2 = parse_line('\s+', 1, $args);

[download]

See Text::ParseWords.

In reply to Re: Switching from backticks to open by repellent
in thread Switching from backticks to open by Eule

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