in reply to System Command Issues

The '<' is something that the shell interprets, but in the multi-arg form of system the shell is bypassed altogether, and '<' is being passed as another argument to mail. Try this instead: 

my $address = 'myname@whatever.com';
my $subject = "Comments -- Version: $Version ID: $ID";
system("mail $address -s '$subject' < blah6.txt") == 0
  or die "mail failed: $?";

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Update: As ikegami's reply below alludes to, a major reason for using the multi-arg form of system is precisely to bypass the shell, and therefore avoid shell quoting headaches. The single argument form of system may not be suitable if $Version or $ID contain problematic characters. If this is the case, I would break down and read in the contents of the input file, and pipe it into the mail command from within the Perl code.

the lowliest monk

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Re^2: System Command Issues
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 08, 2005 at 20:46 UTC
    You better make sure $Version and $ID don't contain single quotes or slashes or ... if you use this version of system.
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Re^2: System Command Issues
by blanket (Initiate) on Jun 08, 2005 at 20:55 UTC
    Followed your advice to the letter. I get a message sent page as I should, but the message never arrives. Any thoughts?
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      That sounds to me like a bad e-mail address. If the e-mail address was given in a double-quoted string, did you escape (i.e. backslash) the @? (If not, in addition to doing that, you should be running this under strict, because under strict an unescaped @ in a double-quoted string would have most likely caused the compilation to fail, thereby alerting you to the problem; it's a good thing to do in general.) And, as ikegami noted, what are the strings in $Version and $ID?

      BTW, I tried a similar short script, and it worked fine; this is what I ran: 

      use strict;
use warnings;

my $address = 'myaddress@myhost.com';
my $subject = 'nothing';
system( "mail $address -s $subject < random.txt" ) == 0
  or die "mail failed: $?";

      [download]

      the lowliest monk

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[d/l]
        Hmm. I've tried that code as well. The "strict" and "warnings" commands are very helpful indeed. It's pointing out some mysterious errors on a particular line:

        Possible unintended interpolation of @whatever in string at myscript.pl line 158.
        Possible unintended interpolation of @whatever in string at myscript.pl line 158.
        Global symbol "@whatever" requires explicit package name at myscript.pl line 158.
        Global symbol "@whatever" requires explicit package name at myscript.pl line 158.
        Execution of myscript.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

        The line in question is a simple print command immediately following the last line of the code I am posting. Line 157 is the system() command causing all the trouble...

        use strict;
use warnings;

my $address = 'myemail@whatever.com';
my $subject = 'Comments Version: $version  ID: $ID';

# backslash the @ sign in the address
$address =~ s/@/\\$1/g;

system( "mail $address -s $subject < blah6.txt" ) == 0
    or die "mail failed:  $?";

        [download]

        By the way, $ID is a 10-character alphanumeric string, and $version is something like "5.3" or "5.4" or "Nightly" (sans quotes, of course).

        Any thoughts? I appreciate all the help so far, by the way. I'm a self-professed perl newb, and can use all the suggestions I can get. Thanks!

        --blanket
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