Thank you everyone for your excellent suggestions above.

I will go ahead and replace my shell calls with direct Perl code. Also, QM's anchor suggestion is great, and would probably have helped me in the first place, though I'm kinda glad I did not, since it forced me to figure out the other loophole in my code. I'll go put it in my code now.

In reply to Re^2: How to handle metacharacters in input file for Perl one-liner code by debug
in thread How to handle metacharacters in input file for Perl one-liner code by debug

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