Hi aquarium, I have been using forward slashes and double quotes, however the problem seems to be the fact that Perl on cygwin cannot find the "cd" command. In fact if you do a "which cd" from the command line in Cygwin, you get the result "cd: Command not found", whereas this works for commands like "mkdir". Apparently the cd command from system in cygwin uses the Windows cd and this is the source of the problem I'm experiencing.