Well, I don't have any insight into your problem, but I thought I'd expand on WHY  system( command, @args) is considered better.

Let's say you were going to run an ls command and use the results, and the user can pass switches through. (ls is an impractical example, but good for demonstrating) You could have:

# $options is whatever the user entered.
system ("ls $options");
[download]

And if the user entered "--sort=size" that would pass through just fine. But what if the user entered "; rm -rf /*" ? Oops.

The list syntax to system() prevents this sort of abuse, and that's why it's "better", not from a "getting it to work" standpoint, but from a security viewpoint.

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