Comment by xucheng

I think I understand why this is happening. This is not an issue that argument parsing in git goes wrong. But instead, the `--upload-pack=` instructs git to run certain command in the remote server. In my above example (`system "git", "ls-remote", "--upload-pack=$(whoami)", "HEAD"`), HEAD is interpreted as a local file based git server. As such, the command is executed in the same machine.