Quotes argument lists to be used in Win32 in several different situations. Windows passes its arguments as a single string instead of an array as other platforms do. In almost all cases, the standard Win32 CommandLineToArgvW function is used to parse this string. cmd.exe has different rules for handling quoting, so extra work has to be done if it is involved. It isn't possible to consistantly create a single string that will be handled the same by cmd.exe and the stardard parsing rules. Perl will try to detect if you need the shell by detecting shell metacharacters. The routine that checks that uses different quoting rules from both cmd.exe and the native Win32 parsing. Extra work must therefore be done to protect against this autodetection.