You can use $WHAT in foo.sh like this. Notice the space.

system('env', 'WHAT=bar', '/Users/onelesd/Work/space/a space/foo.sh') ;

But I can't use PATH... Which makes no sense if there is absolutely no shell interaction. I also do notice that space, that's exactly why I'm trying to get this working. The problem I have is setting an environment variable called PATH because my script uses it. I don't really care much for a variable called WHAT. And rewriting the script is not an option.

P.s. thanks for the help so far!

So replace WHAT with PATH and your script will see $PATH just fine. I used WHAT because the name of the variable does not matter since you are not using a shell in LIST mode, and PATH has no more special meaning than WHAT does.

Beyond that, the only problem I see in your posted code is that you don't give a full path to /bin/bash (and $path isn't defined, but maybe you did that elsewhere).

Which makes no sense if there is absolutely no shell interaction

That's not exactly correct. Remember the magic of Perl---the impossible is always possible. Here's an example. It requires: IPC::System::Simple.

!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
use IPC::System::Simple qw(capturex systemx);

my $PATH  = $ENV{'PATH'};
my $SHELL = $ENV{'SHELL'};

my $path = '/root/Desktop/test a folder/this script.sh';
my @arr1 = ( "printenv", "PATH" );
capturex(@arr1);

my @arr2 = ( "echo", "$PATH" );
systemx(@arr2);

my @arr3 = ("$SHELL", "$path");
my @script = system(@arr3);
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