Hi leslie,
I'm having troubles parsing the command line as you wrote it, so maybe your shell is having troubles, too.
What's the command that's supposed to run on the remote machine? I mean: can you tell us how you would write it if you were on the remote machine's shell?
Also, note that the remote shell is trying to redirect output on the file "3/1/12,name=DISASTER_RECOVERY: -av" because of the first > in the command line.

I tried this:

my @cmd = ('ssh', '-x', 'user@remotehost', '"ls -la > mylsfile"');
my @output = qx/@cmd/;
[download]

@output is empty, since all the output was redirected into the file "mylsfile" on the remote host. I suppose this is more or less what you're trying to accomplish. Maybe trying to split the command into an array may help you sort out the quotes.
If I right interpreted your command, what you're trying to do is:

my @cmd = (
   'ssh',
   '-x',
   '-i',
   '~/.ssh/bkp', 
   '<server name>',
   q[mminfo -q "savetime>3/1/12,name=DISASTER_RECOVERY:\\\\" -av -ot -
+r client >/home/rbr/clnts]
);
[download]

I'm not sure how many \ you will need on that command line (assuming you're trying to put some \ after that colon).

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.