I think you completely misunderstand "support" here. Windows's cmd.exe "supports" single quotes, just like it supports a, b, 3, 7, 9, and =. They are just ordinary characters. A double quote has an entirely different kind of support. It will allow having spaces or other special characters as part of a command argument instead of their normal interpretation (where a space, for instance, would mean a break between arguments) and doesn't itself become part of the argument.

C:\windows\system32>c:/perl/bin/perl -we'print "Hello World\n"'
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.
[download]

Here, perl is getting as it's first argument "-we'print". It interprets the -w and -e switches, and finds that the code supplied for -e is the beginning of a single-quoted perl string, but with no end-quote, causing the error, just as if you had a perl program file consisting of just:

'print
[download]

If you add -leBEGIN{for(@ARGV){print$_}} before the -we, you can see that the space causes what comes after to become a separate argument to perl:

C:\windows\system32>c:/perl/bin/perl -leBEGIN{for(@ARGV){print$_}} -we
+'print "Hello World\n"'
Hello World\n'
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 2.
[download]

If you think cmd.exe does something special with single quotes, show an example.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.