Re: Calling external commands through my script

How you should call them depends upon your needs. Do you need to process their inputs or outputs through Perl? Do you want the external call to be blocking? Do you want to implement time-outs? What OS are you on?

Options include:

backticks or qx{} (see Quote and Quote like Operators);
system;
pipe, fork and exec;
IPC::Open2;
IPC::Open3;

and more. See perlipc for some important detail.

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

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Re^2: Calling external commands through my script by Anonymous Monk on Feb 25, 2014 at 00:42 UTC
It's actually that I want to call the program, which will run and then create a file that I will process. Everything is done on Linux OS. So you think <system> is OK to go, right?	[reply]
Re^3: Calling external commands through my script by kennethk (Abbot) on Feb 25, 2014 at 00:53 UTC
system is a good solution if the program should be blocking, you have no need to interact with STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR, and you don't need to worry about a timeout. Be aware that any STDOUT or STDERR the program generates will just get tacked onto your perl IO channels. I'd recommend using a list-based call to avoid escaping complications (e.g. `system($executable, @args);`) but again, that's generic advice. #11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.	[reply] [d/l]