Wow. Today really seems to be my day for talking past people. Maybe I should stop posting any more today -- there must be something in the air.

Nice straw man. I didn't advocate changing system($line)

Going way back in the thread, I'd suggested 'if only one argument is provided, we have to assume the user provided a valid command line on the current platform', from which you quoted the 'assume...' part and said '...I strongly disagree'. That's what prompted my response.

To use a co-worker's term, I think you, me and BrowserUK are in violent agreement that system(@list) on win32 should be fixed to quote the initial argument, but that system($line) is up to the user to do the right thing.

As a minor note, my suggestion about documenting a recommendation of double quotes was only for the system($line) form, like so:

if ( $^O =~ /Win32/ ) {
    system( qq{"$yourEditor" "$filename"} );
}
[download]

There should be a general warning in docs for the system($line) form about making assumptions about spaces in filenames. On linux, they can be escaped with backslashes. On Win32, each argument that might have spaces needs to be wrapped in quotes. And so on.

Generally, I think people should be encouraged to use system(@list) unless they really need to depend on the shell for something (e.g. file redirection).