Re^2: Passing user input to a shell command

[james734]

I know that the file $file does not exist, I open it to insure that user is typing the file exists. The question should have been how do I tell the shell line that $file = <STDIN> is the value that is entered by the user and to put it into the shell line ie User enters test.txt So $file is now = test.txt the shell command shout be perl /Users/james/perlstuff/macc/macc1 test.txt. James

[jdporter]

I open it to insure that user is typing the file exists

Opening it is not the best way to do that. There are the file test operators, such as -f:

-f $file or die "You specified a non-existent file.\n";

Even if you do open it for this purpose, you should definitely close it right away, before letting another process have it.