(I have made this a reply to your original post; to continue the original thread would have indented too far for my taste)

I can run this at the prompt, but putting in the following, /opt/BIPSConnect/bin/rdes, but when I put it in perl code (here is what I am trying to do - Quite simple and nothing complex, until I get this working) ...

#!/usr/bin/perl-Tw
use strict;
my $cmd_to_run = "/opt/BIPSConnect/bin/rdes";
my @results = `$cmd_to_run`;
[download]

I get the following error... /opt/BIPSConnect/bin/rdes: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/usr/lib:/usr/ucblib:/usr/openwin/lib:/usr/dt/lib:/usr/local/lib:/opt/hpnpl/lib:/p01cfg01/harvest/Harvest/lib:/opt/BIPSConnect/bin: is not an identifier

Okay, this is obviously a UNIX (not DOS/Windows) platform, so that eliminates an entire subspecies of problems.

I notice you are running your perl script with taint mode (-T). Are you, by chance, running it setuid, as well? In setuid mode Solaris (under which you appear to be running) closes the executable file and reopens it such that the program sees /dev/fd4 (or fd5, ...) instead of the name of the actual executable as $0, among other things. In taint mode Perl's behavior apropos the environment is somewhat different as well; certain specific variables must be set to known "safe" values (PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH come to mind, for example). Take a look at Perl security for more on this topic.

Update: Is it possible that the message you're seeing has something to do with trying to use the Bourne shell syntax,

with csh or tcsh, which do not permit this? What is your default shell?

dmm