I have a Perl program which does something like below: #!perl use strict; use warnings; my $exe = "C:\\project\\set_env_and_run.bat"; my $arg1 = "\\\\Server\\share\\folder1"; my $arg2 = "D:\\output\\folder1"; my $cmd = "$exe \"$arg1\" \"$arg2\""; my $status = system("$cmd > c:\\tmp\out.txt 2>&1"); print "$status\n"; I am calling this Perl code in an eval block. When invoked, i get the status printed as 0, but the batch file has not actually executed. What would be the reason for this? Thanks, Jits