Porting Commands to Windows

Elegant has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I'm trying to port a few things to Windows and I'm fairly certain that how I'm translating them is incorrect despite not receiving any errors.

$self->sys('/bin/mkdir', '-p', "$self->{tmp}/attach");
$self->sys('cmd /C mkdir', '-p', "$self->{tmp}/attach");
[download]

The first line is the original (works under linux) and the second line is what I thought was correct under Windows. However, I've never see the results of any of my commands. Is my syntax correct? I have many other cases that involve ln, rm, rm -rf, mv, which are all used in the same manner.

In case you have questions about what sys() is, it's more or less system().

Comment on Porting Commands to Windows Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Porting Commands to Windows by LanX (Saint) on Sep 14, 2014 at 08:15 UTC
Are you aware that Perl has it's own `mkdir` ? :) The portable way to use system calls is to try to avoid them. ;) Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)} Update A quick search revealed that mkdir on win is considerably different to mkdir on unix, especially when handling options like `-p` . But sorry this here is supposed to be a Perl and not an OS forum...	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Porting Commands to Windows by skx (Parson) on Sep 14, 2014 at 09:12 UTC
And for handling nesting, etc, you can use File::Path which is distributed with Perl core. Steve --	[reply]
Re: Porting Commands to Windows by toolic (Bishop) on Sep 14, 2014 at 11:35 UTC
Re: UNIX shell commands in Windows UNIX 'command' equivalents in Perl	[reply]
Re: Porting Commands to Windows by jonadab (Parson) on Sep 15, 2014 at 12:49 UTC
In general, Windows is sufficiently different from Unix that no single simple rule will cover all of the changes you're going to have to make if you're using system(). If you can find ways to do things in pure Perl, without relying on external commands, that will be much more portable. As others have pointed out, mkdir exists as a Perl builtin. Other things can be done with modules (although getting CPAN working on Windows can be non-trivial, so you may want to constrain yourself to modules that ship with a particular Perl distribution for Windows).	[reply]
Re: Porting Commands to Windows by stylechief (Beadle) on Sep 15, 2014 at 18:37 UTC
You mention that you never see the results of your commands. If the module you are using does not have a method to help with this, e.g. `my $error = $self->message();` [download] or something similar. You could, for development and testing purposes, use something like `$result = qx(mkdir $path);` [download] To view results. eval would also provide information if there are problems: `eval{$self->sys('cmd /C mkdir', '-p', "$self->{tmp}/attach")}; if ($@){ print "$@\n"; }` [download] SC	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Porting Commands to Windows by sam_bakki (Pilgrim) on Sep 19, 2014 at 08:50 UTC
Hi Elegant -p is not an option of mkdir in windows. This works, `perl -e "system('cmd.exe /C mkdir c:\a\b\c') or print $!"` [download] Thanks & Regards, Bakkiaraj M My Perl Gtk2 technology demo project - http://code.google.com/p/saaral-soft-search-spider/ , contributions are welcome.	[reply] [d/l]

Update