Question

I am trying launch adduser command from perl.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
"-c 'Fred'",
'-d /vol2/home/DMZ/f.kals',
'-g 3335','-u 11002',
"-k '/dev/null'",
'-m',
'-p "$1$kKNKMa8O$g03oj6YeeZbO2i3NMSoyT1"',
'fred');
system (@test);

When I executed the above, I got the following output:

[ay@pandora /vol2]$ sudo ./test.pl
useradd: invalid home directory ' /vol2/home/DMZ/fred'

Why?

If I do not use array

my $command="/foor/bar/useradd -m -g 1234 -u 6789 -param2 -param3 username"
system ($command);

that works OK.. why not array?

Answer 1

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
"-c 'Fred'",

1. -c and Fred are different arguments, so are -d and /vol2/home/DMZ/fred …

2. When you use array form, you don’t have to escape/quote. (this is why array form is safer — you don’t have to handle the shell escapes!)

So, it should be:

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
'-c', 'Fred',
'-d', '/vol2/home/DMZ/f.kals',
'-g', '3335',
'-u', '11002',
'-k', '/dev/null',
'-m',
'-p', '$1$kKNKMa8O$g03oj6YeeZbO2i3NMSoyT1',
'fred');