Bless you all! Randal, Graff and Davidrw, your comments were very helpful and certainly set me in the right direction. Just for explanation purposes, I needed to use csh because it's the default shell for the application user and the shell sscripts that I need to interact with from Perl are all in csh. The objective is to automate exporting Oracle tables. The vendor supplies a procedure which uses aliases, which in turn calls a number of csh scripts. This is done manually of course! I could not implement this from Perl because the aliases were not expanding properly. So that's why I decided to automate this using the default shell. The prototype script you provided Graff worked like a charm! I can't thank you guys enough!