This functionality is built into the Win32 module which is packaged in the ActiveState dist of perl. All you need to do is this:

use Win32;
my $long = 'c:\\program files\\microsoft office\\';
my $short = Win32::GetShortPathName($long);
print $short;
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There is also a Win32::GetLongPathName(PATHNAME) function which does the reverse.

Also worth looking at is Jenda's Pages. He has a bunch of other Win32 "File Related" modules which are quite useful, one of which is Win32::AbsPath, another is Win32::FileOp.

$code or die
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