I wouldn't. You've got me there, my example would not work. I read the original question as there would be only 1 argument passed to each instance of the JAMES.EXE that was launched. Thus, my intention was to be able to send a single argument to JAMES.EXE - even if that argument happened to be a filename and happened to contain spaces.

It could be done, but you'd need more detailed parsing of the Perl script's input arguments. The original question provided ~ 1 arg1 2 arg2 3 arg3 ~ where # was the instance and arg# was the single argument to each instance. If there were going to be multiple arguments, you could parse the ARGV looking for 1, then 2, then 3 and after each instance is found, launch into a loop that gathers all arguments until the next number in line is found. That would handle ~ 1 arg1 arg1' 2 arg2 3 arg3 arg3' arg3'' ~