Question

Possible Duplicate:
How can I store Perl's system function output to a variable?

I have tried to run a shell command in my Perl script. An example is like below:

system ("ls -al");

The result is well printed on Unix.

Is there a way to return the result to $string in my Perl script instead of returning the result on Unix?

I do not want the result to be printed on my Unix.

Answer 1

Use the backticks:

$string = `ls -al`;

The ‘qx’ delimiter is a synonym for this:

$string = qx{ls -al};

This is documented here in the perlop man page.

Alternately, you can use open with ‘|’ like so:

open my $filehandle, "ls -al|" or die "Open failed!\n";
while(<$filehandle>) {do_something($_);}
close $filehandle;

In this case, you’re opening a filehandle to a pipe attached to the command’s output (basically treating the output as a file). This is handy if the command takes a long time or produces more output than you want to store in memory at a time. This is documented in the Perl open manual.