storing result in variable

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

Hello monks , I am a littel new to perl ,, my script is excuting a ping command to check if it can ping a server , i just need to store the result inot array or variable so I can print it in a nice format ,, I don't need the output to go to the command line .. I need to store to a variable and print it later in the script in the format I want ,, right now I am trying to redrict the output to a file

open (PING, ">>dummy");
unless ($pid = fork) {
unless (fork) {
           print PING exec "ping $host";
           die "no exec";
                  exit 0;
                    }
                    exit 0;
                          }
                          waitpid($pid,0);
                  close(PING);
[download]

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Re: storing result in variable by davidrw (Prior) on Nov 03, 2005 at 17:38 UTC
Net::Ping might work better than a system call.. Some recent threads related to Net::Ping: Net::Ping and STDOUT, net ping question, Net::Ping with threads as for your code, why are you `fork`'ing? Is system (exec never returns -- system does) more what you're looking for? Or even just backticks (see perlop)? open PING, ">>dummy"; print PING `ping $host`; close PING; [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: storing result in variable by slayven (Pilgrim) on Nov 03, 2005 at 20:18 UTC
You may be right about Net::Ping to work better than a system call. But it slightly differs from the ping-program. The default protocol for Net::Ping is tcp where ping uses icmp. The tcp-connection requires a running echo-service on the remote machine whereas the icmp-connection (usually) requires the icmp-packages not to be explicitly dropped. With Net::Ping you can specify icmp as the connection method but this requires root permissions. -- trust in bash but tie your camel	[reply]
Re: storing result in variable by inman (Curate) on Nov 03, 2005 at 17:37 UTC
Try using backticks which enable you to execute a command and capture the output (STDOUT by default). e.g. my $output = `ping $host`; [download] This is the simplest option and is probably OK for a command such as ping which will only take a short amount of time to run.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: storing result in variable by hubb0r (Pilgrim) on Nov 04, 2005 at 05:51 UTC
You can go about it by opening it with the following: `open my $ping, "ping $host \|"; my @pings = <$ping>; close $ping;` [download] Which will leave you with an array of the ping results. You can read more about this in perlopentut or perlipc	[reply] [d/l]