Thanks for the suggestions cephas and ikegami. I did the below:

my $testCmd = (split /\|/, $configLine)[1];
my $cmd = eval "qq($testCmd)";
my $activity = "testActivity";
system("$cmd 1>$activity.stdout 2>$activity.stderr");
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I noticed that it was giving an UnInitialized variable message when I tried to  print "$cmd\n"; And, it executed the command. Thanks again