No, perl should wait for the command to finish before it returns, and even if it didn't should build the entire shell command before executing it. Is this a multithreaded program? Can you give a snippet that actually reproduces the problem? I tried something simple like this: 

$threshold=25;

foreach $variable (23..30)
{
  
  if ($variable < $threshold)
  {
    $command = '/bin/cat';
    $UPDATE = `$command << EOF
$variable is the value from DB. 
$variable is less than $threshold
EOF`;
    print "Update: '$UPDATE'\n";
  }
}

[download]
and it worked as expected.

In reply to Re: A problem with variables inside a system() call by sgifford
in thread A problem with variables inside a system() call by sagat

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