Clearly, 
my $variable = `cat some.file`;

[download]
works fine for "well-behaved" files. I suspect the problem you are having is due to the contents of the file you are listing. Either it is too large (i.e. larger than your RAM so Perl cannot fit it into the scalar, which is unlikely) or it contains some character sequence that causes problems. Does your shell list the file OK?

Cheers - Pat

In reply to Re^3: invoke shell with `` failed by pat_mc
in thread invoke shell with `` failed by jiangliguo

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