In that case, how about breaking it up into concatenated substrings?

tel->print('/apps/current/bin/getz -vf "off des" "[' .
    $database . ' -type: primary|predicted]" &> /data/holdFile.txt');
[download]

As for capturing the output of your command, try the backticks: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#%60STRING%60