perlop says that backticks behave like double-quoted strings, so they interpolate. You can try first building the string and then running it, that way it's easier to debug:

my $cmd = qq{egrep -m 1 "^$lemma:" /home/lexicon};
warn "Running [$cmd]";
my $lexical_entry = `$cmd`;

[download]

... but you could also just use Perl instead of egrep:

...
my $filename = '/home/lexicon';
open my $fh, '<', $filename
    or die "Couldn't open '$filename': $!";
while (<$fh>) {
    return $_ if /^$lemma:/;
};
...

[download]

In reply to Re: How to include a doublequoted string into a backticked expression? by Corion
in thread How to include a doublequoted string into a backticked expression? by pat_mc

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