Below is a script I've put together that is supposed to read names from a file and using the system's grep program determine if those names are in a spreadsheet. The script runs the grep program, but receives errors such as: "No such file or directory," in spite of the files existing. My hunch is there is an issue with how my script handles spaces in the arguments - i.e. the names & directories. Anyone know what I've done wrong? Help is appreciated.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $can_list;
my $can_archive;

if (@ARGV) {
    $can_list = $ARGV[0];    
    $can_archive = '\"'.$ARGV[1].'\"';
} else {
    die "Need both new candidate list and candidate list archive!";
}

# Open candidate list
open LIST, $can_list or die "Cannot open new candidate list file! $!";

# Open results log
open LOG, ">/data/My Documents/candidates_results.log" or die "Could n
+ot open candidate search log!";

while (<LIST>) {
    @results = `grep -i $_ $can_archive`;    
    foreach $result (@results) {
        print LOG $result . "\n";
    }
}

close LOG; 
close LIST;

[download]

NOTE: the names file looks like: 

Jon Doe
Jim Jonson
Dan Smith

[download]

In reply to Executing external program via backquotes by King0

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