Thanks for the suggestion but I am not very familiar with Perl so not really able to comprehend your answer and resolve my case. Basically I have to run a "cp $source $dest" command after logging-in as a different user(ABU) using "sudo su - ABU". The $source and $dest is something that I formulate in my perl script above but I am unable to pass it to the shell command I fork. Code(working snippet): ---- 
print "I want to copy $source to $dest after logging-in as ABU";
open my $fh, "|-", "sudo su - ABU" or die "can't run sudo: $?";
print $fh <<_EOF_;
echo 'Logged-in as ABU'
ls
_EOF_
close $fh;

[download]
The only problem is to run "cp $source $dest" on the next line soon after the "ls" command. But I am not sure how to pass these arguments ?

In reply to Re^4: Heredoc with system call by Anonymous Monk
in thread Heredoc with system call by curtisb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.