When you use system, the output of your command goes straight to STDOUT, which is sent to the browser. You can wrap it in <pre> tags or something similar to have it be displayed as-is, but that's about the most you can do with it. To get fancier formatting, you'll probably want to capture it so you can wrap the individual lines in something. In real life I'd use classes and put the CSS in a separate file, but this should give you the idea -- capture the output with backticks and process it line-by-line: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;

my @l = `ls -1b`;
my $c = 0; # toggle for odd/even lines
for (@l){
    chomp;
    my $bg = $c ? '#eee' : '#ccc';
    say qq| <p style='font-family:mono;background:$bg'>$_</p> |;
    $c = 0 if $c++ == 1;
}

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Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

In reply to Re: Handling the output of a system command -- how to best manage? by aaron_baugher
in thread Handling the output of a system command -- how to best manage? by taint

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