You are seeing the "$" before the 1/2 due to a timing issue

That has nothing to do with the question. Pay attention to the quotes.

I am passing exec a list. At what point does "1 2" turn into "1" "2"? Perl does not split arguments on whitespace, that is something cmd.exe does.

In reply to Re^2: exec always invokes the shell? win32 by Anonymous Monk
in thread exec always invokes the shell? win32 by Anonymous Monk

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