backticks problem

gri6507 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks,

I am trying to find a path to some executable from within my program using my @path = `which myprog`;. Running this on my linux box gives me either the correct path (if found) or which: no myprog in ($PATH).

The same program running under Solaris has a different behavior. Apparently, which for some reason tries to source my $HOME/.cshrc file, which has a problem, and therefore @path has the error message from sourcing .cshrc instead of actual path. How can I bypass this behavior? (ie, don't run backticks interactively).

Update Running any command other than 'which' seems to be NOT sourcing $HOME/.cshrc

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Re: backticks problem by adrianh (Chancellor) on Aug 06, 2004 at 19:49 UTC
Use File::Which instead?	[reply]
Re: backticks problem by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Aug 06, 2004 at 19:50 UTC
How can I bypass this behavior? (ie, don't run backticks interactively). If your .cshrc is being sourced in that seems to mean to me that your `$ENV{SHELL}` is set to /bin/csh or /bin/tcsh. Have you tried setting it to /bin/sh or some other shell? You could also try using File::Which instead of using the *nix command within backticks.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: backticks problem by gri6507 (Deacon) on Aug 06, 2004 at 20:11 UTC
Ok, so i tried use strict; $ENV{SHELL} = '/bin/bash'; my $i = `which prog`; print "$i\n"; [download] and I still get the error message from sourcing .cshrc	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: backticks problem by bigmacbear (Monk) on Aug 06, 2004 at 20:24 UTC
Solaris will always check your `.cshrc` file when running `which`, regardless of your shell. I'm not sure of any way around this other than fixing your `.cshrc` file. The suggestion to use File::Which is a good one. Relying on a backtick command invariably introduces portability problems, which require a lot of defensive coding to work around (hence the astounding complexity of GNU `configure` and the like.)	[reply]