The problem is usually that the command interpreters on those systems have rather different ideas about quoting than the Unix shells under which the one-liners were created. On some systems, you may have to change single-quotes to double ones, which you must NOT do on Unix or Plan9 systems. You might also have to change a single % to a %%.
For example:
# Unix
perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"' # DOS, etc.
perl -e "print \"Hello world\n\"" # Mac
print "Hello world\n"
(then Run "Myscript" or Shift-Command-R) # MPW
perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"' # VMS
perl -e "print ""Hello world\n"""The problem is that none of these examples are reliable: they depend on the
command interpreter. Under Unix, the first two often work. Under DOS,
it's entirely possible that neither works. If 4DOS was the command shell,
you'd probably have better luck like this:
perl -e "print <Ctrl-x>"Hello world\n<Ctrl-x>""Under the Mac, it depends which environment you are using. The MacPerl shell, or MPW, is much like Unix shells in its support for several quoting variants, except that it makes free use of the Mac's non-ASCII characters as control characters.
Using qq(), q(), and qx(), instead of "double quotes", 'single quotes', and `backticks`, may make one-liners easier to write.
There is no general solution to all of this. It is a mess.
[Some of this answer was contributed by Kenneth Albanowski.]