I think Fastolfe has the solution to your problem, but I'd just like to emphasize that backticks are rather expensive, as perl goes to a lot of trouble to gather the output of the command it spawns in the subshell. Consider using system instead, and check to see that the calls succeed. system is a little odd, in that it returns 0 (which in Perl, is a false value) on success, so your system calls should look like:

system("foo") && die "Couldn't execute foo:$!";
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Instead of the usual or die

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor