I'm not convinced that you are correct:  perl -e '$foo="tada;";print "$foo\n"'

Your answer has nothing to do with the | (pipe) causing the error. Whether there is a table to describe or not, does not take away the fact that you can have as many semi-colons inside quotes as you like, Perl will not mind.

[EDIT]
Boy, there I was trying to make things clearer, and I muddy them, sorry.

suekawar, maybe your problem stems from a lack of documentation. I found nowhere on PerlMonks or Perldoc.com that explains how qx works in any simple terms.

perl -e '
> $foo = qx[ echo "Me Graq!" ];
> print "$foo";
> '
Me Graq!
[download]

VSarkiss, I was trying to put across that for someone confused between system, qq and qx your answer might not be so clear.

<a href="http://www.graq.co.uk">Graq</a>

You are missing a critical point... qx/COMMANDLINE/ or system("COMMANDLINE") invokes /bin/sh with the -c option like so: (on WIN32, this is of course a little different)

    execl("/bin/sh", "-c", COMMANDLINE);
[download]

The quotes in COMMANDLINE are not being ignored or parsed by Perl. They are being handled by /bin/sh. Notice that at a /bin/sh prompt, if you were to type:

$ echo "Hello World"
Hello World
[download]

For the original example, the poster was trying to do:

$ SQLCOMMAND; | sqlplus ...

It should have been:

$ echo "SQLCOMMAND;" | sqlplus ...

The shell uses the quotes to group arguments. The quotes are not passed through to the command (again, under WIN32, this is a little more convoluted).

The original problem posted was two-fold. First, as the initial responder suggested, the poster should have used 'echo "SQLCOMMAND;"' not 'SQLCOMMAND;'. As a later responder suggested, the poster should not be using both qx// and system() as both will execute the command. Either system() should be used if the output does not need to be intercepted, or qx// should be used if the output does need to be intercepted.

thanks for the help