Just to confirm that I've struck similar issues (with various commands) over the years, and the first suggestion that haukex mentioned has worked, for reasons that I've never worked out.

The difference is: system($cmd) runs the command (with its contained arguments) via a shell which is spawn first, whereas the system($exename, @args) calls the $exename command directly without the mediation of any shell (unless of course it is a shell-interpreted script). In Unix, the shell will take care of wildcard expansion *.xyz and the interpretation of special variables, e.g. ~/. So, there is a difference in what finally is run. In windows I don't know if the shell does anything and what. I am sure that, in any OS, the added layer will have its effect on metacharacter quotation and escaping ...

If there is only one scalar argument, the argument is checked for shell metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is /bin/sh -c on Unix platforms, but varies on other platforms). If there are no shell metacharacters in the argument, it is split into words and passed directly to execvp , which is more efficient. On Windows, only the system PROGRAM LIST syntax will reliably avoid using the shell; system LIST , even with more than one element, will fall back to the shell if the first spawn fails.

(from system manpage)

edit: removed a section and placed it in separate comment

bw, bliako