First, please use <code> tags for your code. It's very, very difficult to read your program.

Are you sure the error is coming from perl? How are you passing pipe characters on the command line if you're not using quotes?

Also, please "use strict;" and "use warnings;" before posting:
<code>

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $stuff = $ARGV[2];
print $stuff;
exit;
[download]

</code>