All,

I have a script foo.pl that reads a tiny XML file into a variable. foo.pl then calls another Perl program bar.pl via system and attempts to give the XML to bar.pl with a command line switch -d: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

open (XML, $somefile) || die "Could not open $somefile - $!";
my $xmldata;
while (<XML>) {
   $xmldata .= $_;
}
close (XML);
system("bar.pl -p 1234 -d $xmldata");

[download]
bar.pl just has the following: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Getopt::Std;

getopts('d:p:');
our $opt_d;
our $opt_p;
print $opt_p, "\n";
print $opt_d, "\n";

[download]
Unfortunately, the XML file (that foo.pl reads) contains all kinds of yucky shell metacharacters such as quotes, newlines etc: 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data config="dev">
   <SomeTag>data</SomeTag>
   <AnotherTag>data</AnotherTag>
   <SQL>select foo from bar where baz = 'something'</SQL>
</data>

[download]
Only a portion of the xml data is actually making it into $opt_d in bar.pl. Do I have to escape every metacharacter in $xmldata prior to calling bar.pl?

In reply to system & shell metacharacters by Anonymous Monk

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