Question

I am under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that the ‘exec’ function in Perl does not return a value (I get the impression it just runs the command). The situation is that a Perl script is running on a server and I need to invoke this script to run commands inside the Linux box, but also return the results. How can this be done?

Answer 1

If by “return the results” you mean return STDOUT of the commands, what you need is backticks or qx(). E.g.:

my $result = qx(echo foo);
# or
my $result2 = `echo foo`;

Do note that messages to STDERR are not returned.

If you mean the exit status of the program, use system:

my $status = system("echo foo");
# or
my $status2 = system("/bin/echo", "foo", "bar");