in reply to Quote marks lost in system() calls

Recall that system() behaves differently with one argument than it does with multiple. Perl treats a single argument as though it were a shell command, scanning for and processing shell metacharacters. Having played with it a bit, I'm not 100% convinced that on NT it behaves as one would expect it to coming from Unix.

Does 

system("at", "12:00", "program.exe", '"the.server.org:1234"');
work any better for you?

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Re: Re: Quote marks lost in system() calls
by dws (Chancellor) on Dec 21, 2000 at 04:45 UTC
    I tried the following on NT 4.0 with ActiveState 5.005_03. 
    if ( @ARGV ) {
    foreach my $i ( 0 .. $#ARGV ) {
        print "ARVG[$i]: ", $ARGV[$i], "\n";
    }
    exit(0);
}
system("perl $0 foo bar");
system('perl ' . $0 . ' "foo bar"');
system("perl $0 foo \"bar baz\"");
system("perl $0 foo \"\"bar baz\"\"");
system("perl", $0, "foo", '"bar baz"');
    which yielded 
    ARVG[0]: foo
ARVG[1]: bar
ARVG[0]: foo bar
ARVG[0]: foo
ARVG[1]: bar baz
ARVG[0]: foo
ARVG[1]: bar
ARVG[2]: baz
ARVG[0]: foo
ARVG[1]: bar baz
    Unless I missed something, this suggests that you may be SOL on getting the doublequotes passed through on NT.
[reply]
      This seems to behave as you desire, though I'm still not sure if its what Three-G wants (from his description, I thought its what I previously posted):
      if ( @ARGV ) {
    foreach my $i ( 0 .. $#ARGV ) {
        print "ARVG[$i]: ", $ARGV[$i], "\n";
    }
    exit(0);
}
system("perl", $0, 'foo', '"\"bar baz\""');
# or this:
system("perl", $0, 'foo', qq("\\"bar baz\\""));

ARVG[0]: foo
ARVG[1]: "bar baz"

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[reply]
[d/l]
        Ha! Good catch. ++ for runrig.
[reply]

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