You could check the $? variable after the backtick call. My best guess is that rsh is in /usr/sbin, which isn't in the PATH environment variable in your CGI environment.

Another idea would be to capture stderr:

@top=`rsh $node top -n 1 -b 2>&1`;

[download]
Then you might catch what the shell and/or rsh is unhappy about.

In reply to Re: Trouble Using "Top" Within Perl by kschwab
in thread Trouble Using "Top" Within Perl by Anonymous Monk

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