Beyond Alexander's tips, there's one more thing that bugs me:

You chdir to $current_dir, then prepend $current_dir/ to your command. Works nicely on Unix for $current_dir being absolute or . or ./. . But for "" or a non-trivial relative path, you're in for a surprise... .

One way to cope is prepending $ENV{PWD}/ to a relative path. Note that $ENV{PWD} isn't updated by chdir(), being set by the shell. Note 2: Better yet, check Anonymous' File::chdir pointer below and prepend $CWD instead (thx, this elimininates most of the chdir pains! Note2Self: my($CWD) stops the chdir side effect of assigning. Good.).

Ad afoken's warning on using the shell:

If you restrict yourself to Unix (and CYGWIN), you normally can assume at least a Bourne-style or POSIX shell, which allows a nice idiom using %ENV to avoid severe secure quoting headaches: $ENV{f}="...";system qq{ls -l -- "\$f"};.

Open Question: Windows processes should support %ENV as part of their POSIX support. What is be the corresponding secure Windows-NON-CYGWIN-idiom for the Unix shell's variable interpolation w/o word splitting, i.e. "$f"?

cu & HTH, Peter -- hints may be untested unless stated otherwise; use with caution & understanding.

In reply to Re: running programs from PERL by jakobi
in thread running programs from PERL by metalnut

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