win32 pipe help

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

I am having great difficulty with trying to run a win32 exe from perl. on the cmd line it would be:
xx.exe word_up
If I try

open(HECK,">xx.exe");
print HECK "word_up";
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xx.exe is overwritten with 'word_up'

if I try

open(HECK,"| xx.exe");
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I get a crazy win16 bit error, but open(HECK,"| grep up");
works, but that doesn't help me. (grep.exe)
so then I tried ->

use win32;
win32::spawn ( "xx.exe", "xx word_up", $Pid );
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nothing
Help me out here, please. I am losing.

Thanks

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Re: win32 pipe help by etcshadow (Priest) on Aug 12, 2004 at 02:14 UTC
To put it simply, I think that what you want is one of: # run xx.exe word_up and get the output of that program in a variable my $xx_output = `xx.exe word_up`; # just plain run the program... let the output go to the terminal # just as it would be if you ran it at your dos prompt system "xx.exe word_up"; [download] You're sort of confusing the program's input stream from it's command line. (In perl, this is the difference between STDIN and @ARGV... in C you'd call it stdin and argv/argc... whatever). It's the difference between (again at a command prompt) doing: `echo stuff \| foo.exe` [download] (where "stuff" is going to be the input to foo.exe) and doing: `foo.exe stuff` [download] (where "stuff" is the first parameter to foo.exe). And it's also possible that you're additionally confusing it with: `foo.exe < stuff` [download] (where "stuff" is the name of a file, the contents of which are to be the input to foo.exe). `------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: win32 pipe help by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 12, 2004 at 02:26 UTC
It seems you are confusing pipes (sending and/or receving via stdin and stdout of the child program) and command line parameters. `open(FH, "\| xx.exe"); print FH ("word_up");` would send it to the xx.exe's STDIN, but you mentioned it was a command line argument. You could pass it as an argument by doing `open(FH, "\| xx.exe word_up");`. However, I'm not sure if `open(FH, "\|...");` will do what you want (since I don't know what xx.exe does). Check out the following: `open(FH, "\|...");`: Can send command line arguments. Can send commands/data to the child's STDIN, but it's output is not collected. Child operates in parallel with parent. `open(FH, "...\|");`: Can send command line arguments. Nothing sent to the child's STDIN, but it's output is collected. Child operates in parallel with parent. `system()`: Can send command line arguments. Nothing sent to to child's STDIN. No output is received from the child. The child exits before the parent continues. `` (backticks): Can send command line arguments. Nothing sent to to child's STDIN, but it's output is collected. The child exits before the parent continues. `Win32::Process` (`Win32::Spawn` is deprecated): Can do anything!	[reply] [d/l] [select]