There may be a simpler way to "DOSify" the file name but this works for me. There's a Win32 API call GetShortPathName that returns the DOSified path name. You can call it from perl using Win32::API. The prototype is

DWORD GetShortPathName(
  LPCTSTR lpszLongPath,  // null-terminated path string
  LPTSTR lpszShortPath,  // short form buffer
  DWORD cchBuffer        // size of short form buffer
);
[download]

The equivalent call in perl can be written like this:

use Win32::API;

#import the function
my $GetShortPathName = new Win32::API("kernel32","GetShortPathName",[ 
+P,P,N ],N);


if (not defined $GetShortPathName) {
    die "could not import GetShortPathName";
}

#the name we want to convert
$longname = "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office\\OLREAD9.TXT"
+;

#create a string big enough to hold the shortname
$shortname = " " x 80;

#retval will be length of the DOSified short name
$retval = $GetShortPathName->Call($longname,$shortname,80);

#trim the trailing blanks
#recall that $shortname = " " x 80
#and retval is the length of the name returned by GetShortPathName
$shortname = substr($shortname,0,$retval);

print "longname = \n\"$longname\", \nshortname = \n\"$shortname\"";
[download]

On my system, this returns

C:\temp>perl shortname.pl
longname =
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\OLREAD9.TXT",
shortname =
"C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office\OLREAD9.TXT"
C:\temp>
[download]

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