execute shell script from perl

[rajaman]

Dear Monks,

I am trying to call a shell script from my perl program, like:

my @array=qx( ./shellscript.sh <<< " string argument passed ");

But I get the following error:

sh: 1: Syntax error: redirection unexpected

However, when I run the shellscript directly on the command line as (./shellscript.sh <<< " string argument passed "), it works fine.

Any hints?

Thank you.

[choroba]

qx , as documented in perlop, runs /bin/sh, which might be different to your terminal shell. Most probably, the shell in which the "Here String" works is bash, but /bin/sh is dash which doesn't support it.

Also note that what follows <<< isn't a "string argument", but it gets passed to the preceding command on standard input (after some expansions).

[Mr. Muskrat]

/bin/sh is dash

That all depends on the OS. That appears to be true for Debian and Debian-based OSes (Ubuntu, ArchLinux, etc). On Fedora 25 /bin/sh is a symbolic link to bash. On some OSes /bin/sh is still the Bourne shell.

[afoken]

On some OSes /bin/sh is still the Bourne shell.

And that's not all. /bin/sh varies wildly with OS and OS version, so it should be avoided where possible. If one has to resort to using a shell (why on earth?), one should explicitly use that shell (e.g. use /bin/bash, /bin/ksh or the like) instead of hoping for the default shell.

Alexander

[haukex]

I wrote about the topic of running external commands at length here. In this case, since you seem to want to pass something to the script's STDIN and get something from its STDOUT, IPC::Run3 is a good choice IMO; it allows you to capture STDERR too if you need to. Note that running the script with a relative path ("./shellscript.sh") is another possible point of failure, as it relies on the current working directory.

use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Run3 'run3';

my $in = " string argument passed ";
my @cmd = ('/path/to/shellscript.sh');

run3 \@cmd, \$in, \my @out or die "run3 failed";
$?==0 or die "command failed, \$?=$?";

chomp(@out);
print "<<$_>>\n" for @out;

Update: Changed output to array to be more in line with OP's code.

[rajaman]

IPC::Run3 works great. Thanks all for the suggestions.

[NetWallah]

Following up on choroba(++)'s post , this produces the expected result:

perl -E 'say for qx(/bin/bash -c "cat <<< \\"This is text\\"")'

[Anonymous Monk]

use IPC::Run3 instead