in reply to passing values to another perl program
It appears that the script ldbtest.pl is being run by your
shell instead of by the perl interpreter.
Do you have the shebang line (#!/usr/bin/perl -w or something like it) as the first line of your script? Also check the permissions on this script. I assume they are ok, considering you are able to run it from command line, but doesn't hurt to check.
/prakash
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom