Reading console output into a perl

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

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to perl and I am trying to get some console output read into a variable within perl. Here is what I have so far:

$myVar = system ("C:\\configInfo.exe");
print "the Variable is:" . $myVar;
[download]

All I get for my output is: 'the Variable is: 0' Can someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thanks.

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Re: Reading console output into a perl by duct_tape (Hermit) on Nov 25, 2003 at 21:57 UTC
`system` returns the exit status of the program not the output. To retrieve the output of it, you can use backticks. $myVar = `C:\\configInfo.exe`; print "output: $myVar\n"; [download] Hope that helps. Brad update: double'd backslashes.. whoops. Thanks Corion.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Reading console output into a perl by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2003 at 22:04 UTC
Awesome, Exactly what I needed to know, thanks.	[reply]
Re: Reading console output into a perl by vek (Prior) on Nov 26, 2003 at 13:53 UTC
There's one other way of retrieving the output. Use `open` `open (OUTPUT, "C:\\configInfo.exe \|") \|\| die "Couldn't run configInfo.exe - $!\n": while (<OUTPUT>) { # do stuff which each line of OUTPUT... }` [download] Note the pipe after the `C:\\configInfo.exe` command. -- vek --	[reply] [d/l] [select]