Hi Monks,

this is probably a simple one, but like most simple things, it has me stumped

when I run this from the command line, it works fine

cat text.txt|wc -l| sed 's/^[ \t]*//'|sed 's/[ \t]*$//'
but when I call it from perl with a system call
#!/usr/bin/perl system( "cat text.txt|wc -l| sed 's/^[ \t]*//'|sed 's/[ \t]*$//'" );
I get an error sed: 1: "s/ \t*\n/": unterminated substitute pattern

Yeah, I know there is an obvious mistake, but I just can't see it. Could someone please point out the obvious?


In reply to works on command line, but not from perl by elwoodblues

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