What operating system are you running this perl script on? What shell is being used by that operating system? When I run your command on using backtics on my system (Debian Linux, bash shell) I don't get an error at all.

If you need portability across operating systems, I recommend you stay away from backtics and pipes and instead use Perl functions. The following short script does the same thing as your grep/awk combination:

#strictures - put these two lines at the top of every Perl script
#these do a lot of the debugging work for you
use strict;
use warnings;

... lots of other stuff ...

# do: awk '/fileid/,/^-----/' logfile | grep specificdata
my $bPrint=0;
open LOGFILE, '<', "Monks/tmp/logfile.txt" or die;
while (my $line = <LOGFILE>) {

  #equivalent to awk '/fileid/,/^-----/' logfile
  $bPrint = 1 if $line =~ /fileid/;
  $bPrint = 0 if $bPrint && $line =~ /^-----/;

  #equivalent to grep specific data
  print $line if $bPrint && $line =~ /specificData/;
}
close LOGFILE;
[download]

To learn more about the Perl concepts involved in the above code:

• strict and warnings explain what the two lines at the beginning mean and what they can do for you
• perlopentut - will explain how to open and close files in Perl
• retut - will explain how to use =~ to filter data using regular expressions. Perl regular expressions are much more powerful than the awk regular expressions with which you are probably familiar.
• perlport - things to watch out for if you are using Perl on multiple operating system to other.

Best, beth

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