use backticks or qx() instead of system or exec. As perldoc -f system and same for exec will tell you, that's going to give you the result of the shell level command call, while system gives you the result of the call to system which is not what you want.

Update: system, as borisz told us, is the call you're looking for, but be careful because end-of-Update:

My GNU tar actually gives back the names of the extracted files on STDOUT, even when it is called with system, but that's not the behaviour I had expected. Maybe have a few test runs to see what your tar does.

Update2: Yes, testing for undef works allright.

Cheers, Sören

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Working with TAR files by Happy-the-monk
in thread Working with TAR files by SpaceCake

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.