To expand upon previous answers, this is really an issue with MS, specifically cmd.exe, rather than Perl. Perl is passing explorer $url, with $url interpolated, to your shell. Lets say $url = http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=816742. However, the shell misinterprets the = and attempts to execute the command explorer 816742 which fails to find the server 816742, naturally. The solution is to tell the shell to treat the whole argument as a string by wrapping the url in double quotes. Of course, then you can't use double quotes to wrap the string in Perl, so thank goodness Perl has so many delimiters: Quote and Quote like Operators. Since you require interpolation, qq is a good way to go, a la system(qq{explorer "$url"}), which of course looks eerily similar to ikegami and Corion's solutions above.

Update: This might actually be explorer messing up the interpolation, since echo http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=816742 behaves as expected. Could not find any web resources, however, describing how explorer parses CLI arguments.

In reply to Re: Problem with strange URLs by kennethk
in thread Problem with strange URLs by samuelalfred

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