Try replacing ' for ".

From the POD:

GetOptions does not split the command line correctly 

The command line is not split by GetOptions, but by the
 command line interpreter (CLI). On Unix, this is the
 shell. On Windows, it is COMMAND.COM or CMD.EXE. Other
 operating systems have other CLIs. 

It is important to know that these CLIs may behave
 different when the command line contains special
 characters, in particular quotes or backslashes. For
 example, with Unix shells you can use single quotes (')
 and double quotes (") to group words together. The
 following alternatives are equivalent on Unix: 

    "two words"
    'two words'
    two\ words


In case of doubt, insert the following statement in front
of your Perl program: 

    print STDERR (join("|",@ARGV),"\n");


to verify how your CLI passes the arguments to the program.
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I tried with double quotes and it's still the same (not working of course).
when executing:

--> myprog -s "two words"
--> myprog -s 'two words'
--> myprog -s two\ words
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I got the same result: myprog|words (using the print you suggested). any ideas?

Hotshot

It is nearly impossible to find an error without the code. are you sure you read perldoc Getopt::Long thouroughly?

my $s = '';
GetOptions('string=s' => \$s);
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should normaly do what you want (it does for me). Maybe you forgot to pass your variable as a reference?

I did exactly the same as you, here is it:

local %hash;
if (GetOptions(\%hash, 'pdcuse!', 'uamlist=s', 'loginmesg=s')) {
    &doSomething();
}
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as you can see I used hash (reference), but doesn't supposed to matter (it happened to me even when I didn't used hash).

Hotshot

use Getopt::Long;

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;
GetOptions(\%hash, 'pdcuse!', 'uamlist=s', 'loginmesg=s');
print "" . Dumper(\%hash) . "\n";
__END__
perl test.pl -u "test eins zwei drei" -l "test drei vier fuenf" -p
yields:
$VAR1 = {
          'pdcuse' => 1,
          'uamlist' => 'test eins zwei drei',
          'loginmesg' => 'test drei vier fuenf'
        };
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using local instead of my doesn't alter the result, it simply works...(older SuSE, bah, perl 5.6.1)
So I'm out of luck here...
regards,
tomte

---

Makeshifts last the longest.

sorry, but i'm not using Microsoft, i'm working working on Linux.

Hotshot

Well, so much for that. It's still a shell issue though, not one of Perl. What shell are you using? And have you tried with double quotes?

Makeshifts last the longest.

$cmdline = join(' ',@ARGV);
parsetoargv($cmdline);
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sub parsetoargv {
  my ($cmdline, $idx) = (shift, 0);

  @ARGV = ();

  {
    $cmdline =~ m{ \G\               }gcx && do {redo}; # Eat a space

    $cmdline =~ m{ \G"               }gcx && do {       # Start a quot
+ed-string
      $cmdline =~ m{ \G(.*?)(?<!\\)" }gcx && do {       #   Match up t
+o the next unescaped quote
        ($ARGV[$idx++] = $1) =~ s/\\"/"/g;              #     And put 
+it in ARGV, removing escaping slashes
      }; redo
    };

    $cmdline =~ m{ \G(.*?)(?="|\ |$) }gcx && do {       # Match up to 
+just before the next quote, space, or end-of-line
      $ARGV[$idx++] = $1 if ($1 ne ''); redo            #  And put it 
+in ARGV if it isn't empty
    };
  }
}
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