Dear Perl Monks: I'm having an interesting problem with Perl on OS X Mountain Lion, perl v5.10.1. I replaced a bash script called on-firstboot.sh with a Perl script called on-firstboot.pl that does a number of things to a newly imaged Mac such as set the machine host name. I am using system to make these calls to bash, like so:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# Declare dependencies
use File::Slurp;

... other code here ...

# Do system calls to set computer name
@args = ("scutil --set ComputerName '$name'");
system(@args);

@args = ("scutil --set HostName '$name'");
system(@args);

@args = ("scutil --set LocalHostName '$name'");
system(@args);
... script continues...
[download]

The first two of these work just fine. The $name variable contains a MAC address, in this case:

3c0754131c6d

The third command above fails with this error:

SCPreferencesSetLocalHostName() failed: Invalid argument

It's almost as if the first two commands get the variable $name contents correctly and the third gets an empty string.

Any ideas? Perhaps I need to escape some of these quote characters? I used single quotes to avoid a quoting issue. The commands at the Terminal in OS X work fine with the MAC address in question whether I use single quotes or double-quotes. The failure only happens in the Perl script.

Other system calls in the Perl script are working fine. Perhaps I should insert some sort of sleep command to pause between system calls? (How does one sleep in Perl?)

Cheers...

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