Yep. After reading your first reply I thought I would try to rewrite the code without using the system command that way and instead calling start. It worked! Hmm, so now I wonder what the limits of calling system(1,foo) are? Is this a limitation in Perl? What is really happening here?

Fixed code below:

#!perl
use strict;
my $dir=shift || die "no image dir";
my $viewcmd=qq|rundll32.exe C:\\WINDOWS\\System32\\Shimgvw.dll,ImageVi
+ew_Fullscreen|;
opendir(DIR,$dir) || die "Error opening $dir\: $!";
my @files=grep(/\w/,readdir(DIR));
close(DIR);

foreach my $file (@files){
    my $absfile="$dir\\$file";
    next if $absfile!~/\.(jpg|gif|bmp)$/is;
    my $syscmd=qq|start $viewcmd $absfile|;
    print "$syscmd\n";
    system($syscmd);
    select(undef,undef,undef,.5);
    }
[download]