I had the same type of problem... Turned out it was because the $5 was being interpreted... Add \ (awkcmd '{print \$5}'"; and it will work... or at least it did for me.
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Awk in perl
$datecmd = "/bin/date";
$temp = `$datecmd | $awkcmd '{print $5}'`;
print "$temp";
Does anyone know why the following perl code does not work. When I ran the perl script above it does not seem like awk is invoked.