Well, everyone else already answered the most urgent problem, but there are a couple other things. If I run your snippet with warnings turned on, it spits out the old uninitialized value warning because you never set $out anywhere prior to executing this line: my @out = split( /\s+/, $out);

What exactly do you think @out is going to contain, if you're trying to split undef?

It's often helpful if your boiled down snippets are actually executable code... unless of course the question is "Why won't this execute?". ;)

Good luck!