They are both single scalar arguments, but are passed to the shell which then works out which executable to run.
Fortunately, they are. Imagine what would happen if Perl would bypass the shell. It would then try to execute gened.html or 1-centre.png, which would fail, because these files are not executable programs. The shell also "knows" about this weird Windows feature called "file associations" and implicitly invokes the "start" utility to start the appropriate application for you.

-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

In reply to Re^5: system and wildcard expansion? by rovf
in thread system and wildcard expansion? by BrowserUk

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