Question

What does the below statement say exactly?

my @dirs = qw(fred|flintstone <barney&rubble> betty );

The complete story is:

my $tarfile = "something*wicked.tar";
my @dirs = qw(fred|flintstone <barney&rubble> betty );
system "tar", "cvf", $tarfile, @dirs;

This has been taken from Learning Perl, 4th Edition.

The result that the system command will run on shell is:

tar cvf fred|flintstone <barney&rubble> betty

But does this command has a meaning on unix?

Answer 1

qw() splits the string between parentheses through whitespaces (spaces, tabs, any number of them) and returns a list: "fred|flintstone", "<barney&rubble>", "betty"

EDIT: hint from @kemp: it returns a list

And now to your updated question:

tar cvf fred|flintstone <barney&rubble> betty

Yes, the characters |, <, > and & do have meanings in Linux:

| redirects the standard output from tar cvf fred to the standard input of flintstone.

< sends the file barney to the standard input of flintstone

& runs the previous command and sends it to background

> writes the standard output of rubble to the file betty

Whether the whole line has a meaning, it depends on individual programs.