Ahh, thanks Stevie-O. This does seem to be a problem with cmd.exe - I get the same results when I use it directly. Unfortunately, ^" doesn't seem to work correctly, nor does "". Very frustrating. Is there any way to compile Perl on my Windows environment to use the Cygwin bash shell instead?

That looks interesting, ZlR. I'll check out those modules and see if I can easily change my program to use them. I wasn't really looking to redirect the output to a filehandle, though -- just capture it in a variable. I'm calling an external program to set the music tags on MP4 files that I'm processing, so I wanted to capture its error messages in case the program failed. This problem arose for some song names and artists that contained a " (usually 12" mix or something similar).

Okay, Google'd and tested out a few things. It turns out I can get it to work in cmd.exe by replacing " with "^"" (all four characters). This works both from the cmd.exe shell and calling it from Perl:

#### arg_test.pl ####
my $output = `print_args.pl "Test" "Hi (12"^"" mix)" "test.txt" 2>&1`;
print "$output";
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C:\scripts>print_args.pl "Test" "Hi (12"^"" mix)" "test.txt" 2>&1
Arg 0 - Test
Arg 1 - Hi (12" mix)
Arg 2 - test.txt

c:\scripts>arg_test.pl
Arg 0 - Test
Arg 1 - Hi (12" mix)
Arg 2 - test.txt

However, this isn't consistent for other external programs. I wrote a simple C program to do the same thing as print_args.pl. Replacing " with "^"" in parameters still works from the command line, but now it fails when running it from Perl.

// PrintArgs.exe
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    for (int i=0; i<argc; i++)
    {
        fprintf(stderr, "Arg %d: %s\n", i, argv[i]);
    }
    return 0;
}
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#### arg_test.pl ####
my $output = `PrintArgs.exe "Test" "Hi (12"^"" mix)" "test.txt" 2>&1`;
print "$output";
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Here's the output I get running it directly in the shell and then from Perl:

C:\scripts\arg_problem>PrintArgs.exe "Test" "Hi (12"^"" mix)" "test.txt" 2>&1
Arg 0: PrintArgs.exe
Arg 1: Test
Arg 2: Hi (12" mix)
Arg 3: test.txt

C:\scripts\arg_problem>perl_test.pl
Arg 0: PrintArgs.exe
Arg 1: Test
Arg 2: Hi (12^
Arg 3: mix) test.txt 2>&1

This is killing me. How is the Perl-shell interaction fine in the first case but not the second? Is Perl using the exact shell on my system (c:/windows/system32/cmd.exe) or its own version? Could it be processing the parameters in some way before passing them off to the shell?

I'd really appreciate any ideas on what's going on.