Your exec didn't do what you want because... well, that's not what exec does. It doesn't capture output. Read the docs on exec, system, and backticks (``) for a better understanding.

Actually, he's running grep in a reasonable way. The open() call sets up a pipe, forks, and hooks the pipe to the child process's stdout; he then execs grep in the subshell. The way he's exec'ing grep, he also avoids the question of shell metacharacters in the $string variable.

Scain: The problem may be the script's current directory. The script is running grep (recursively) on ".". When you run the script by hand you could be starting it in the directory you want grep to search. The web server probably starts the script with a different directory as its current directory, so your script would have to chdir() to the right spot, or else give the full /path/to/the/directory instead of using ".".

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.