You needed braces around your code block while() { code here } and you would need to fork to awk with system (most likely). I may not even understand the question.

UPDATE: You may want to slow down the posting a little. It looks like you asked this question in "Re^2: pass variable to another process when invoking from command line" already. Also, since "scripting probs" seems to be related as well, it might pay off to read "How (Not) To Ask A Question." I bet you could have combined all these into one if you asked everything at once.

You seem to think you can just call awk from your Perl script, and that isn't going to work.

This is the third time you've asked your question.

I hadn't noticed. Now I do. Which reminds me yet another one of my .sigs (it's in Italian, but I'm translating it into English now, and I don't know where it's quoted from), namely:

Repeating a foolish thing a large number of times doesn't
make it a pearl of wisdom.
It only becomes a tiresome foolish thing.

(With not particular offense to the OP intended, and a better phrasing welcome.)

I don't know what shell you're using, but that's not valid syntax for the bash shell. Nor is it valid syntax for Perl. It looks like you're confusing Perl and shell scripting, trying to mix them together to make something.

--roboticus

hi monks i want to pass a file name generated by a shell script to another one ... the shell script program i want to pipe my filename into ..looks like this

And why do you want to use Perl to do so? In shell (well, at least in bash - which I'm familiar with) you just use stuff like script2 $(script1). (You can also use backticks, but I just don't like them, and $() has the advantage of allowing nesting.)

while (my $var = <STDIN>) awk -f work_5messages.awk $var
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This is neither Perl nor shell, although it slightly resembles both. In Perl this could be

while (my $var = <STDIN>) {
    chomp $var;
    system 'awk', -f => 'work_5messages.awk', $var and
      die "D'Oh! (Do better error checking!!)";
}
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and in (ba)sh,

while read var; do awk -f work_5messages.awk "$var"; done
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OTOH...

syntax error near unexpected token `)' 
`while (my $var = <STDIN>) '
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This looks like a shell error. You should clarify what you're really after, to help us to help you.

If all your Perl program is doing is calling an awk script, I would suggest you use a2p and convert work_5messages.awk to Perl. This may require some testing to make sure a2p did the right thing, however in the long run, it will probably be easier than trying to maintain two programs: the Perl wrapper and the awk script.

perl -e 'while (my $var = <STDIN>) {$run = "awk -f work_5messages.awk ".$var; `$run`;}'

Apart that you don't need to create a temporary variable like that, and I don't see any particular advantage in doing so, any good reason to use backticks in void context?!? If you really want to stay minimal,

chomp, system "awk -f work_5messages.awk $_" while <STDIN>;
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or (better)

chomp, system qw/awk -f work_5messages.awk/, $_ while <STDIN>;
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But even better is to handle possible errors...