Hey all,

I am using perl to open another program and to run the program.

The program uses a shell, and I was wondering how to exactly program with it.

Right now I have:

$prog = "prog";
$status = system($$prog");

#The program opens correctly in a shell, I don't know how to run the shell of the new program
#this is what I have tried

print $status "open blablablablablabla"; #but it is the correct syntax and all

any tips?

Thanks in advance

eagle

Are you trying just to execute the program, or to control it and give input to it while it's running? Simply executing the program is almost what you've got there:

$returnValue = `command goes here`;
For example, to grep for the phrase "stuff" in a file "textfile.txt", you'd do
$returnValue = `grep stuff textfile.txt`
just like it was on the commandline.

Using system() won't actually get you a meaningful return value, in case you're looking for one.

Giving continuous input to a program you're trying to kick off inside of your perl script is quite a bit more complicated.

Edit: for clarity's sake, those are backticks (`), not single-quotes (').

IIRC Perl allows you to use pipes to interact with other programs. If you want to write to the standard input of a program, you have to create a file handler like this:

then any print FH "..." will be received by programname as input. Conversely, you can do

and reading from FH will use the output of programname.

HTH!

PS: There has been a lot of time since the last time I programed in Perl, so the syntax could be slightly different.

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