I never claimed it would work. In fact, it seems you have a Windows shell problem. I've never worked on Windows, don't care about the platform, and never will work on Windows. I don't have any suggestions how to solve your problem (well, except upgrading to something useful, like VMS or a Unix flavour or even Linux)

What I did point out was that the "problem" isn't caused by qx not able to deal with newlines. It can. If the shell you're using cannot deal with multi-line statements, get a better shell. If your shell does not understand here documents, don't send a here document to it. This is not a Perl problem.