Consider using placeholders instead of actually specifying the values--it'll speed up subsequent (equivalent) database queries because the database driver can then pull the compiled statement out of the cache.

my $query = "SELECT * from table1 WHERE pacos=?";
my $results = $dbh->prepare($query);
$results->execute("tacos") or die "Exec err: ", $dbh->errstr;
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DBI will take care of all the quoting for you. Or, if you'd rather not use placeholders (for whatever reason), at least don't try to do the quoting yourself; use:

my $query = "SELECT * from table1 WHERE pacos=" . $dbh->quote("tacos")
+;
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