Your sample does not contain any troublesome characters, but the shell splits on unquoted whitespace, which my earlier suggestion would prevent by wrapping $sensor in shell quotes before passing it to the shell. My immediate suspicion is that you may have some "odd" site names. In particular, an ampersand is both reasonable in human-readable names and special to the shell.

The best way to fix this would be to get the shell out of the picture and use the list form of system. You will also need to use open or sysopen to rearrange your filehandles so that the second child will inherit STDOUT and STDERR opened for append on the worklog file, while the first child keeps its original STDOUT somewhere to report the result from the second child.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.