My code looks exactly like the one you suggested.

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -e
"my %accounts = (
    tom => \"BigApple\",
    tom2 => \"BigApple2\",
    tom3 => \"BigApple3\",
    tom4 => \"BigApple4\",
    tom5 => \"BigApple5\",
    tom6 => \"BigApple6\",
    tom7 => \"BigApple7\",
  );
  my $counter = 1;
  for my $userID (reverse sort keys %accounts) {
    print \"$userID\t\";
    print \"\n\" if $counter++ % 3 == 0;
  }
"
tom7    tom6    tom5
tom4    tom3    tom2
tom
[download]

There's a lot of command line "noise" from having to escape all the double-quotes for Windose, but that's exactly the code I ran and its output: otherwise exactly the code bangor posted. What is the code you are running?

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

I tested this on my WinXP 32 bit machine. It works fine. Something is wrong with your command line, what I don't know. But there is no fundamental need to escape the " characters. A side effect of a Windoze command line could be true.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my %accounts = (
  tom =>  "BigApple",
  tom2 => "BigApple2",
  tom3 => "BigApple3",
  tom4 => "BigApple4",
  tom5 => "BigApple5",
  tom6 => "BigApple6",
  tom7 => "BigApple7",
);
# sort the users in descending order
my $counter = 1;
for my $userID (reverse sort keys %accounts) {
  print "$userID\t";
  print "\n" if $counter++ % 3 == 0;
}

__END__
Prints:

tom7    tom6    tom5    
tom4    tom3    tom2    
tom
[download]