Re: why IPC::Open3 can't execute MS-DOS "dir" command?

[moritz]

I'm not a Windows user, so forgive my stupid question: Is there a dir.exe or dir.com binary? If not, it might be a shell builtin, and thus not be available for launching externally.

Anyway, for file listings you can also use glob or opendir, readdir, closedir or File::Find (or File::Find::Rule, which has the more convenient interface for newcomers).

[ikegami]

nah, system tries to use cmd /c if it doesn't work without.

[moritz]

Curious, is that documented somewhere?

system mentions usage of the shell only for the case when there is a shell meta character in the command.

perlport mentions that there might be commands which are invokable but don't exists as files, but doesn't mention that perl makes extra effort to makes them invocable.

[ikegami]

Probably not.