Check out perlop, where it says about qx() (or backticks, ``, which most of us will be more familiar with):

In list context, returns a list of lines (however you've defined lines with $/ or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR), or an empty list if the command failed.

By default, that is a newline. So the list returned contains one item per line. The question remains: does your command line return a multiline result? I'm not familiar with what you try to do, so I can't tell.

You can easily test in two ways:

• @a = qx(COMMANDLINE);
  print scalar @a;
  [download]

• $a = qx(COMMANDLINE);
  print "<plaintext>$a";
  [download]

The former will print the number of items, the latter will make the browser display the text as plaintext, line wrapping an all.

I just hope that yo ucan tweak your command line so that you can get separate lines for the returned items. If not, you can set $/ to whatever string separates the data items.