qx wasn't introduced until about 5.005, so it's no surprise that it doesn't work on Perl 4. Don't know about backticks. I've never used Perl 4 as it was replaced over seven years ago, long before I started using Perl.

Perhaps you could try system instead.

I'm interested in why you have to use Perl 4. As I said before, it is very out of date and was replaced with something far better over seven years ago. I believe there are still outstanding CERT security advisories against Perl 4, so using it is potentially very dangerous. Please upgrade to something more recent.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

Thank you, I will look at system. I have to use Perl 4 perl.exe as part of a Tivoli installation. My only other option would be to use Per2Exe to convert it, but the company won't buy it for me. I will look into the system command. Thank you!

Sounds like someone should be getting in touch with IBM to find out why they're using a very out of date version of Perl then.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

Backticks were supported in Perl 4. But the various Perl 4 ports to DOS-like systems had to use different tricks to get enough memory to be able to run Perl. So I suspect the problem is that asp.exe doesn't like being run from whatever extender your particular port of Perl 4 was built using.

Perhaps you would have better luck with something like:

    system("start asp.exe > asp.txt")
        and  die "'start asp.exe' failed ($?): $!\n";
# or
    system('start '.$ENV{COMSPEC}.' /c "asp.exe > asp.txt"')
        and  die "'start cmd asp.exe' failed ($?): $!\n";
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Note that those are just guesses about how to "escape" the theorized problem with the "extender" and other combinations may be required (such as dropping "start" from the second example).

Thank you all for your help. I have decided to write the data to an array rather than a text file (which I should have been doing originally - but I'm still too new).

@perfdata = `asp.exe` || die "Couldn't run asp.exe: $!\n";
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Thank you for all of your suggestions!!

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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Sorry, no error at all - nothing. There is a pause that is the same length as when I run the command from the command prompt rather than the script, but no error message at all. Another person has suggested I look into the system function. I'll start there. Thank you for taking the time to comment.