Greetings to all,

So, in Perl, the following two pieces of code are equivalent: 
$output = qx/ls/ ;
print $output ;

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and 
use Win32::Script qw/WScript/ ;
$output = WScript('Shell')->Exec("ls")->StdOut->ReadAll ;
print $output ;

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(except that WScript will use \r\n instead of \n as end of line).

Not so with ActiveState's PerlScript used as the client-sided scripting language in HTML Applications (HTA--a Windows-specific thingy--basically HTML page running on IE on client machine without the security). Consider the following in a HTA page: 
<SCRIPT language="PerlScript">
    $output = qx/ls/ ;
    $window->document->write($output) ;
</SCRIPT>

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and 
<SCRIPT language="PerlScript">
    use Win32::Script qw/WScript/ ;
    $output = WScript('Shell')->Exec("ls")->StdOut->ReadAll ;
    $window->document->write($output) ;
</SCRIPT>

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qx returned nothing, whereas WScript worked as expected. If I do: 
<SCRIPT language="PerlScript">
    qx/ls > output.txt/ ;
</SCRIPT>

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output.txt would be created with results in it, so I know qx did execute the command.

Why such behavior, anyone knows?

Thanks (and thanks to grantm for giving me some pointers).

In reply to qx vs WScript: Why didn't qx work in my ActiveState's PerlScript? by chunlou

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