in reply to RE: Re: sending arguements to external program
in thread sending arguements to external program

No. Command line arguments cannot exceed a small size. If you want to be passing larger amounts of data between applications, you need to use standard IPC techniques (see perlipc). Something like this:
# in parent open(CHILD, "|other_program arg1 arg2") or die "other: $!"; print CHILD $large_amount_of_data; close(CHILD); # in child local $/; $large_amount_of_data = <STDIN>;
Again, see perlipc for more examples and alternatives.