Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.
Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:
You're confusing the purpose of
system()
and backticks (``).
system()
runs a command and returns exit status information (as a 16 bit value: the low 7 bits are the signal the process died from, if any, and the high 8 bits are the actual exit value). Backticks (``) run a command and return what it sent to
STDOUT.
$exit_status = system("mail-users"); $output_string = `ls`;