Thank you roboticus, I will try to define my problem in broad terms, the example code is a result of many attempts to solve this. It may not be perfectly accurate. I want my perl program to read in a list of servers,passwords, accounts, source file from say, a comma delimited file, then for each line of the input ftp the file to the destination server. Very easy to do!! Except, when you encounter reserved characters in the user defined password. One example of a user defined password that fails to connect is "Peleton@1". All manor of quote combinations was used. Note When "Peleton@1" is declared as a literal in the program successful connection is achieved, so the issue is in the parameter passing process. Thank you