greetings,

i understand that it's the shell that dislikes what it's getting from the perl script. i just don't know how to get perl to give the shell what i'm obviously trying to pass to it. the escaped dbl quotes yielded the same result. if this helps, the line below works but i'm trying to eliminate the su and rsh and simply gettin what i need from the now nfs mounted filesystem where $Glstat lives:

Code:

$StatusRawString=`su $USER -c "rsh $HeadNode \\\"grep -F -e 'time...' $Glstat\\\" | tail -n 1"`;