Careful here there are 2 things going on.

1) I presume you know that win32 does not support the pipe character and the which command, and I'll move on to the other possible dumb thing:

2) On my solaris implementation, there si no support for which at the non-root level. Hence your command does not work on this machine either. This is the case on my machine. Because of this, I tried to use an env variable $VAL

Here's what I got:

509$ echo $VAL
/usr/local/home/esop/esop_dev/batch/apps
510$ echo $VAL  | perl -e '$_ = <STDIN>; $_ =~ s|/|\\|g; print "a $_";
+'
\usr\local\home\esop\esop_dev\batch\apps
511$ echo $VAL  | perl -e '$_ = <STDIN>; $_ =~ s|/|\\|g; print "$_";'
\usr\local\home\esop\esop_dev\batch\apps
512$
[download]

I suggest you try the same thing to make sure that you're not enjoying double errors.

--Hackmare