I require some assistance. I am writing a CGI script in Perl on Solaris that needs to run external commands using the 'system' operator. These commands are part of a larger package that needs the system initialized (via a command) properly before execution, or else each individual command cannot interact with the other, like the following.

1: system "/PATH/initialize_system"; # init the environment
2: system "/PATH/skew.k ARG_FOR_FRAME_NUMBER"; # create image
3: system "/PATH/savegif.k FRAME_NUMBER"; # save image off
4: system "exit"; # exit the environment created with initialize_system

When running a command using 'system', the environment appears to only lasts until the next line of Perl code, so line 2 can't talk to line 3 because the environment required for them to communicate isn't there which is initialized by line 1. The above code snippet would the way it is run from a command line. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

In reply to Environmental Settings by Anonymous Monk

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.