Hi As a basic demonstration "cracking" program, I had a go at feeding permutations to openssl via the system command. With a simple permutation code snippet purloined from the web, this worked ok. However, when I try to feed a 3-char $perm from Algorithm::Permute as an environment variable via system to openssl (see code below), it is as if openssl somehow unsets or corrupts the contents of $perm - the 3-letter passphrase is never found. But if I replace the call in system to openssl with one to, say, echo $perm, there's no issue - the variable is clearly available in the shell. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Algorithm::Permute;

#~ my @array = 'a'..'d';

my @array = (  "ö", "a" .."z" ); # ranges and lists to permute

my $perm = "";


my $i = 3;
my $p = new Algorithm::Permute([@array], $i);
my @res;
while (@res = $p->next) {
    $perm = join("", @res);
    
    print "$perm\n";

    
    if ($perm eq "art"){
    
        # If the system command is included below, this test is _never
+_ true.
        # So the system command changes $perm is some way!!
        # WTF?
        print "found $perm \n";
        die;
    }

    system("echo $perm | openssl bf -pass stdin -d -in encryptedfile -
+out out.txt && file -b out.txt | grep -q '^ASCII text'") == 0 && die 
+"Found passphrase \"$perm\"";

}

[download]
My test file encryptedfile is blowfish encrypted with a 3-letter passphrase "art". The ascii text test is to eliminate false positives for which openssl produces binary garbage. I'm not very advanced yet in the Perl liturgy, O Monks. Can you help?

In reply to Need help with Algorithm::Permute and openssl by wdef2

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