For your code to work you need to escape the '$' awk is using: 
my $pSWP = `awk '/something/ { print \$3 }' /dir/file`;

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But like others said, why use awk when you can do it in perl :)

In reply to Re: Using Perl instead of awk! by codiac
in thread Using Perl instead of awk! by Ragged Robin

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