A couple things that come to mind (might not help, but just in case):

If the printing is being done in the context of html or xml output (e.g. for display on a web page), then obviously you would need to convert all angle brackets and ampersands to their corresponding entity references before printing them (  s/\&/\&amp;/g; s/</\&lt;/g; s/>/\&gt;/g;).

(Update: rearranged the order of those substitutions -- ampersands need to be done first; of course, someone will probably recommend a module to do those replacements, which is probably a good idea.)

Have you checked the length of "$Ttorun", in addition to printing its contents? (Is it actually longer when you remove the "<" from the database record, and shorter when the record contains "<"?)