Question

Usually to get the output of a command I run from perl I use back tick

my $value = `pwd`;

How do I do it though if I need to insert a variable within the back ticks “?

Answer 1

Text inside backticks is interpolated before it is passed to the operating system in the same way as text inside double quotes. So these statements all do what they look like they do:

$value = `$command`;
$value = `$someCommand $arg`;
$value = `$someOtherCommand @list`;

qx() is another way of running an external command and returning the output. If for some reason you don’t want Perl to interpolate your command, you can run qx with the single-quote delimiter.

$value = qx'echo $PATH';   # shell's $PATH, not Perl's $PATH