But a bigger question is: Why do you want to use perl for this? When you have so many backticks, you should question if perl is the right tool at all.

It is much simpler in shell. For example, in ksh:

umask 002
set -A SERVERS server server2 server3
path="/home/backup/nightly"

while (( $i < ${#SERVERS[*]} )); do
  cp ${path}/${i}/etc_passwd passwds.${i}
  (( i = i + 1 ))
done
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