Thanks all for the advice on placeholders and the use of DBI, both I will further investigate and learn. :)

The delete does work as indicated, but that delete statement is from a field already in an existing database. I'm just trying to read from one table, and store the field in another table. When I try to store the data, I always get an syntax error due to the inside single quotes. Sometimes there are backticks as well. I guess the real question was how do I stop Perl from interperting the command line as just text and not code that should be executed.

I'll try Michael's suggestion to see if that works for me.

Thanks again.
budman