Thankyou all. I feel like a dunce, but a more educated dunce!
I can't believe I've not hit this before. Looking over my scripts though I can see why. I always used to issue
then evaluate $result to see if it had worked. Also I've never issued a command before that returns nothing when successful (NT is normally fairly verbose). Here I've changed my coding style together and have tripped over my own shoelaces.
documentation again. I'm not too hot on Perls in built variables. I've got the hang of $_ but not a lot else, what should I feed into perldoc to gain enlightenment?