Dunno. It works for me with 5.8.9 & 5.10.1. If I omit the 'dir ' from my example, it loads the image into the default image viewer. No leading space required.

Admittedly I haven't bothered to exactly replicate your weird path. Perhaps that is somehow fooling Perl's command parser into believing that the first part of the path is actually a command and is therefore bypassing the shell and failing.

If it is a bug, it's probably too obscure to be bothered trying to fix. You have a workaround, though avoiding weird dir names might be easier :)

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In reply to Re^3: win32 parenthesis system weirdness by BrowserUk
in thread win32 parenthesis system weirdness by ldln

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