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.

Makeshifts last the longest.