That mostly sounds wonderful. Thanks. Sorry for any contributions I made to the confusion. (: However:

system(@li­st) on win32 should be fixed to quote the initial argument,

(emphasis added). I agree that the initial argument should be quoted. I strongly disagree that the subsequent arguments should not be quoted.

I'm glad that you've dealt enough with the problem of spaces in command path names to understand the value in removing the portability problem. I'm sad that you don't see that the problem for the remaining arguments is nearly identical.

We can't solve this problem for the remaining arguments as solidly as for the first argument, but the same problem can be improved quite well fairly simply and it would be a huge improvement for being able to do a lot of things more portably in Perl.