I didn;t know about that functionality in regards to the LIST context of the system command..
I quoted $tarball cause I'm paranoid.. I always quote, or use braces liberally... I'd rather be overly paranoid and make sure the guy coming after me knows exactly what I meant when I wrote it as opposed to leaving some ambiguity...
And thanks for the chdir ... couldn't remember the function name, but I knew it was buried in there somewhere..
/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */
You won exactly nothing by quoting $tarball though - it doesn't have any noteworthy effect other than making Perl do some extra work to concatenate it into a new string consisting only of the variable's content. You also break references if you try to pass them around like this, and if you don't enable strictures, you're going to accidentally be turning the references into symbolic ones to boot. Perl ain't shell, so don't quote variables when you're not concatenating them into a larger string.