In case you want to try and do some ^O switching, I've used this on linux. It might get you over a tricky quote syntax hurdle.

my $linkurl = 'http://zentara.net';
my $command = "mozilla -remote \"openURL($linkurl)\"";
if(fork() == 0){ exec ($command) }
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UPDATE.. here is a little better script that will do local files too. There is a way to select between new-tabs and new-windows, but I didn't make a commandline switch for it. There are also some special syntax differences for firefox, which I don't use. So all, in all, if you could incorporate all the possibilites for IE,Mozilla, Firefox,etc, and have it auto detect urls or local files, you would have a cool module. Maybe Browser::AutoLoad? :-)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Cwd;
 
my $pid; 
my @docs;

if(@ARGV){  
   my $cwd = getcwd;

  foreach my $arg(@ARGV){
      if( $arg =~ /^http:\/\/.*$/ ){ push @docs, $arg }
       else{ push @docs , "file://$cwd/$arg" }
      }
 }
  else{  #load defaults
     @docs = qw(                 
                file:///home/zentara/1down/1GET
                http://www.google.com       
            );
    }

 # Look for instance of mozilla.
 `mozilla -remote "ping()"`;    
          
 if ( $? ) { 
 # Error, mozilla is not running.           
    if (!defined($pid = fork())) { # Undef branch of fork:       
       die "Cannot fork: $!";      
    } elsif ($pid == 0) {          # Child branch of fork:       
       `mozilla`;                  # Start new instance.... 
    } else {                       # Parent branch of fork:        
       do {
          `mozilla -remote "ping()"`;     
          #sleep 1;
      select(undef,undef,undef,.5);    
       } while ( $? );
    
    #sleep 1;  #give mozilla some time               
    select(undef,undef,undef,.5); 
                                  
     load_docs();
     $pid=waitpid($pid, 0); # Wait for the pseudo-process 
                            # containing the new mozilla instance 
                # to end.           
    }   
 } else { load_docs(); }
############################################################### 
 sub load_docs {    
    my $element;
    foreach (0..$#docs){
         if ( $docs[$_] =~ /~file:\/\// ) 
        { `mozilla -remote "openFile($docs[$_], new-tab)"` ; 
          #`mozilla -remote "openFile($docs[$_], new-window)"` ; 
        } 
        
     else { `mozilla -remote "openURL($docs[$_], new-tab)"` ;  
           # `mozilla -remote "openURL($docs[$_], new-window)"` ;  
       }
     } 
 }
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