Re: Run multiple shell commands on the same perl script

[Athanasius]

in reply to Run multiple shell commands on the same perl script

Hello Daral, and welcome to the Monastery!

As 2teez explained, you can use system to run an external command from within a Perl script. But note that system returns the command’s exit status, not its output. If you want to capture the command’s output, use backticks (or the equivalent qx operator):

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $ls = `ls`;
print "Output from ls:\n\n", $ls, "\n";

my $con = `ipconfig`;
print "Output from ipconfig:\n\n", $con, "\n";

Update: To capture both the output and the exit status, use the CPAN module Capture::Tiny.

Hope that helps,

[space_monk]

$? returns the result code from the last system() call or backtick operation, I believe, so you can both capture output and process result codes.

Example:

#!/bin/perl
# first command deliberately generates an error....
print `rubbish`;
print "Rubbish Result: $?\n";
# this command should succeed
print "ls Output:\n";
print `ls -l`;
print "ls Result: $?\n";

Output:

Rubbish Result: -1
ls Output:
total 10
-rw-r--r-- 1 Userid Domain Users 1242 Oct 30 10:04 1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 Userid Domain Users 1531 Oct 30 10:04 2.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 Userid Domain Users  351 Oct 30 10:48 test.pl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 Userid Domain Users  108 Oct 31 14:21 var.pl
ls Result: 0

Note the first output of $? is -1 (an error), whilst the second is 0 (success)