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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