Thank you, Perl Monks, for providing the venue where such novice questions can be aired and Zaxo, thank you for the code snippet. As someone that is struggling to learn Perl and has no mentor to turn to I do appreciate your investment in me.

Here is a brief description of what I am trying to do. Script ONE is activated by a message console and passed some message text which it turns into arguments against two SQL tables taking the extracted data and placing it in a data repository table then checks to see if script TWO is running. if no, starts it then in either case, script ONE ends.

Script TWO checks the repository table for an elligible candidate, when found writes it to Remedy then ends. All this to be done by a guy who as yet does not have a firm grasp of Perl basics hence my great appreciation for this site(it gives me hope).