First of all... is there any reason this should be calling a second program, as opposed to a subroutine? If not, see the first comment in this thread.

If this actually does have to be done via some sort of interprocess communication, the easiest way is to serialize the input hash for the command line, and to serialize the output hash to STDOUT. It looks something like this... starting with the calling script: 

my %input_hash = ( ... );

# serialize your hash
my $arguments = Dumper \%input_hash;

# this is how to escape an arbitrary string for the unix shell
$arguments =~ s/'/'\\''/g;
$arguments = "'$arguments'";

my $resultstring = `perl my_other_script.pl $arguments`;
my %result_hash = %{eval $resultstring};

[download]
and the called script would do this: 
use Data::Dumper
my %input_hash = %{eval $ARGV[0]};

# do stuff... don't print anything!

print Dumper \%result_hash;
exit;

[download]
Of course, this is dependant on being run on unix for the shell-escaping. If this were being run on a different system, you would need to escape the command-line appropriately. If you wanted this to be truly cross-platform, though, you'd have to pipe in the input string, which would require you to use IPC::open2 (allows you to create both a pipe in and a pipe out of a process... backticks are only a pipe out, but are simpler to use).

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:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq

In reply to Re: Calls to other Perl programs by etcshadow
in thread Calls to other Perl programs by mcogan1966

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