Ah! I almost forgot... I think I remember what the case was by the way. The guy(?) wasn't getting any error messages from backticking an rsh command, and the app wasn't behaving as expected. I think it was myself and swiftone that told him to inspect $? and $! respectively and that unfolded an error coming from the rsh command he was running.

This is way off topic now, but I just thought someone might be still be wondering.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!