You need to take a long look at the documentation for system, backticks and here documents.

In your first example, the backtick run the command and return the output to your script - but you ignore it. system would be better in this case.

Your second example is a lot more confusing (and confused!) You've got three separate sets of backticks, each of which will be executed immediately. The first passes the string '<< EOF' to at, the second runs myprog.cgi, the third runs the command EOF(!)

You probably want something more like:

system('/intranet/myprog.cgi idnumber=220');
[download]

I'm also interested in why myprog has a .cgi extension. A CGI program is one that is run by a web server in response to an HTTP request. This one seems to be a standard Perl script.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me