Try to "chomp" them before using in this .

print "Server->$server<-\n";
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$actionid was the one giving me the problem, chomped it now I'm good to go, thanks NetWallah!

Thanks NetWallah. I tried the string with the server and actionid vars entered in manually but still got the same result.

Assuming that NetWallah is right and you've got newlines on those variables, that makes me think you're getting them from user input (a file or the console). Note that this potentially opens you up to a big security hole! I would recommend using an array to store your command, because this will let you use the safer form of system where you give it a list with more than one element. You may also want to use a module if you want to capture the output of the external command, such as capturex from IPC::System::Simple. I wrote about this topic at length here.

my @wgetlog = ('/usr/sfw/bin/wget','-r','-np',
    '--reject','index.html*','--https-only','--no-check-certificate',
    '--user',$userid,'--password',$password,
    "https://$server/dev/$userid/${actionid}_$pkgname");
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Thanks haukex, I will give this a try.

bliako made a very good point that reminded me I forgot to mention: Using the "list" form of system, or a module that avoids the shell, also avoids the issue of having to escape special characters in the strings!

Here you go:

$ cat TonyNY.pl
#!/usr/bin/env perl 
use strict;
use warnings;

my $userid   = 'u';
my $password = 'p';
my $server   = 's';
my $actionid = 'a';
my $pkgname  = 'p';
my $wgetlog  =
    '/usr/sfw/bin/wget  -r -np --reject "index.html*" --https-only --n
+o-check-certificate --user ' . 
    $userid .  ' --password ' . $password . ' https://' .
    $server . '/dev/' . $userid . '/' . $actionid . "_" . $pkgname . '
+/';

print "$wgetlog\n";
$ ./TonyNY.pl 
/usr/sfw/bin/wget  -r -np --reject "index.html*" --https-only --no-che
+ck-certificate --user u --password p https://s/dev/u/a_p/
$ ./TonyNY.pl | wc -l
1
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Take this SSCCE, and put your own variable content in it. You'll soon find where you are going wrong (Hint: It's your $actionid value which is problematic)

And just to solve the XY problem as well, see LWP::UserAgent or any of the other web-retrieval tools on CPAN so you don't have to shell out in such a convoluted fashion in the first place.

... good answer (as well as the suggestion to use a module to spawn command and capture output) but should n't your expected output to be on just 1 line (and not 2 as you ask)? Or do you assume that some variables will end in a newline and some wont?

Btw that password needs to be quoted, in single quotes (if you are in unix/osx etc., don't know the whims of win).

Once I used this as my password: `rm -rf / && echo 734:8aA_ags_`. Plenty of special characters in there to satisfy the most strict password strength checker.

password: `rm -rf / && echo 734:8aA_ags_`

Now that's a password xkcd://Bobby Tables's mom would approve of. :-)

I'm using Solaris BTW, thanks.