Doesn't mailx need some input on it's STDIN, like the message for instance? I think you need to do something like (untested) :

  open MAILX,'|/bin/mailx -s "hello" john@work.com' or die $!;
  print MAILX 'Your message here';
  close MAILX or die "mailx: $! $?";
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I would however recommend using another mechanism to send mail in your program, not limited to piping directly to sendmail or using a module such as Email::Send

/J\

Gellyfish,

not sure why the other suggestions didn't work, but yours did so that's what I went with.

As it happens I needed to email the contents of a file and found this to work :

$file="/tmp/output.txt";

my $text = do { local( @ARGV, $/ ) = $file ; <> } ;

open MAILX,'|/bin/mailx -s "Output" John@work.com' or die $!;

print MAILX $text;

close MAILX or die "mailx: $! $?";

many thanks to all who contributed, Ad

Hopefully this plain-text illustration is clear enough to highlight the problem with your second examaple.

system("/bin/mailx -s "hello" john@work.com");
       ^              ^  ^  ^              ^
       |              |  |  |              |
       quote          |  |  quote          unquote
                      |  bareword
                      unquote
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It ought to be a "bareword found where operator expected" error.

An example; `echo "test message" | /bin/mailx -s "hello" john@work.com` should probably work.

Check out the command under a shell prompt and make sure you copy it EXACTLY into the "backticks"; if you have to hit additional return keys or anything similar then it won't work as you first tried it.

HTH

Dave R