wperl is the correct answer. It runs perl as a "WINDOWS" subsystem application. Normally perl runs as a "CONSOLE" subsystem application.

Without a console, your perl script will not have a proper STDIN, STDOUT, or STDERR. Perl does the best it can to paper over the problems, but doing IO redirection with child processes can be troublesome.

exetype.bat in the perl/bin directory converts the console version of perl into a WINDOWS subsystem app.

See the MSDN article on the SUBSYSTEM linker option for MSVC for a tiny bit of info.