I did indeed try both of those... oddly, neither worked. (btw, I believe you mean to point out that there are backticks, not backslashes in the first line... I knew what you meant ;)

I think there's some sort of issue with the fact that when the shell script is invoked, it forks, so that by the time the perl script picks back up, the %ENV is back to being blank. But I could be full of it, as this isn't my area of expertise...

Thanks anyway for the help... it's good to know that I wasn't way off when I tried that myself :)
markguy