G'day perladdict,

You've been here long enough to know about using the strict and warnings pragmata. Why don't you? In this instance, warnings would have told you:

Use of uninitialized value $. in concatenation (.) or string at ...
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You've also been here long enough to know about posting actual error and warning messages, not some vague or incomplete version. Here's what your code actually produces:

syntax error at -e line 2, near "if =="
  (Might be a runaway multi-line "" string starting on line 1)
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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Backticks (`...`) are interpolating quotes: see perlop: Quote-Like Operators. The $. is interpolated as an "uninitialized value" (which warnings tells you); so "if $.==" becomes "if ==" (which the full error message tells you).

That explains the problem; however, why are you starting another perl process? You're already running a perl process — just let it run the code.