So here is the entire program, this is just a prototype but its just looking through the many home directories we have to find files owned by $UID, and chown's them to the new UID($NEWUID): 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

my $UID = 1202;
my $NEWUID = 51617;

my @home = ( "/home1/", "/home2/", "/home3/", "/home4/", "/home5/",
             "/home6/", "/home7/", "/home8/", "/home9/", "/home10/",
             "/home11/", "/home12/", "/home13/", "/home14/" );
my $i = 0;
foreach( @home )
  {
    opendir DH, $home[$i] or die "Cannot open $home[$i]: $!";

    foreach $dir ( readdir DH )
      {
        next if $dir eq "." or $dir eq ".." or $dir eq ".snapshot" or 
+$dir eq "TT_DB";
        print "find $home[$i]$dir -user $OUN -print | xargs -n 1 chown
+ -h $NEWUID\n";
        system("find $home[$i]$dir -user $OUN -print | xargs -n 1 chow
+n -h $NEWUID");
      }
    $i++;
  }

[download]
the output is so: 
find /home1/castillo -user 1202 -print | xargs -n 1 chown -h 51617
sh: syntax error at line 1: `|' unexpected

[download]
So the command I'm giving it prints out exactly as expected, and running that by hand does work. I guess I don't understand why a | is 'unexpected'. I did try `-print \; |` but that doesn't work either.

Thanks to all who replied.

Mike C

In reply to Re: using pipes in a system() call by mcarlson
in thread using pipes in a system() call by mcarlson

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