Perl has awk functionality built in, so you can do something like:

$x = "ack thpt barf";
@fields = split " ", $x;
print $fields[0], "\n";
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I think this is exactly what I need! Thanks.

On second thought. Almost! I need $fields to now be just that first field. Not just print the first field, it now needs to be a new variable.

I tried

$fields = print $fields[0], "\n";
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close but no cigar, yet.

Update:

Very many thanx to LanX - modifed 2nd suggestion to correct parenthesis, but ignored nested quotes comment since they are most definitely deliberate - without them, perl would split the string '$variable' whereas with them, the shell expands the shell variable and perl then splits that string.

perl -e 'print (split /\s+/, "'$variable'")[0]'

nested quotes? :)

update

and the brackets belong to print , (...)[0] won't work.

Cheers Rolf

(addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

What you seem to want is open with a pipe-symbol¹ to write to awk's STDIN.

Calling awk from Perl is somehow strange, though, Perl was primarily designed to replace awk and sed .

update

if you just wanna pass a handful of variables better use arguments in backticks

 my $result = `awk $var1 $var2`;

but I don't know much about awk (cause I don't need to ;-)

¹) like in

        
open(my $awk, "|awk >Tmp$$") # $$ is our process id
   or die "Can't start awk: $!";
print $awk $var1, $var2;
close $awk;
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Calling awk from Perl is somehow strange, though, Perl was primarily designed to replace awk and sed .

For what it's worth, there is the a2p tool to convert AWK scripts into Perl. It can be helpful in transitioning to Perl from AWK.

Please provide enough of your perl code to show what the variables are, the input, and what you expect the output to look like.

echo $variable | awk '{print $1}'
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is redundant. Save yourself some typing.

echo $variable
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Okay, you are probably trying to do more than just print a single variable, but that's all I have to go on from what you've given me so far. Well, there's an array called @F and scalars called $time and $error, but it's anyone's guess as to what they contain or what they are for.

So to make it simple.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$error = '2014-06-04T15:24:21-05:00 syslog_dp [0x80e00099][ftp][error]
+ secure-backup(FBB): trans(5487)';
$time = print $error|print $F[0];
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$time should then = 2014-06-04T15:24:21-05:00

$time = print $error|print $F[0];

That attempt to pipe one statement to another statement like you would do when piping shell commands won't work.

You've already been shown a couple ways to extract the datestamp.

$error = '2014-06-04T15:24:21-05:00 syslog_dp [0x80e00099][ftp][error]
+ secure-backup(FBB): trans(5487)';

$time = (split /\s/, $error)[0];
print $time, "\n";

# or you could do this:
($time) = $error =~ /^(\S+)/;
print $time, "\n";
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