G'day Takamoto,

[I created a quick test.pdf, with just the text "Test for PM 11148715", for the tests below. I don't have p2t, but I do have pdftotext, which appears to have the same functionality and accepts the same options.]

You appear to have got bogged down in absolute vs. relative paths and eval code.

If your p2t is in a directory listed in $PATH, you don't technically need a path at all; however, using an absolute path avoids tainting.

If all you want to do is print the PDF text, you can use system() or backticks like one of these:

$ perl -e 'system "pdftotext -nodiag -layout -enc UTF-8 test.pdf -"'
Test for PM 11148715

$ perl -e 'print `pdftotext -nodiag -layout -enc UTF-8 test.pdf -`'
Test for PM 11148715
[download]

If you want something a little more robust, that avoids the overhead of using the shell, consider capturex() from IPC::System::Simple. Here's an example (p2t_capturex.pl):

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use IPC::System::Simple 'capturex';

my $p2t_exe = 'C:/cygwin64/bin/pdftotext.exe';
my $pdf_doc = 'test.pdf';

print capturex(
    $p2t_exe => qw{-nodiag -layout -enc UTF-8}, $pdf_doc, '-'
);
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You get the same output as before:

$ ./p2t_capturex.pl
Test for PM 11148715
[download]

$ ls -i1 `which pdftotext` C:/cygwin64/bin/pdftotext.exe
844424931368301 /usr/bin/pdftotext
844424931368301 C:/cygwin64/bin/pdftotext.exe
[download]