Perl only uses a shell to execute commands if the command string contains shell metacharacters, like the greater-than symbol used to redirect output. That's why it works with no redirection, but breaks with it.

The solution, as others have said, is probably to add something to your path that has cmd.exe. Generally a Windows system will have this by default, so you may want to look into why your PATH doesn't have this.

A quick hack that might help is something like:

$ENV{PATH} .= ";c:\\windows\\command".
              ";c:\\windows\\system32".
              ";c:\\winnt\\system32";
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