How do I use a regex to parse $x = system

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

I was trying to do the following:

$whatisit = system "whatis grep";
$whatisit =~ s/.*-//;
print $whatisit;
[download]

Which didn't work, but if I test the regex with the actual output of whatis, then it does work:

$x = "grep           (1)  - print lines matching a pattern";
$x =~ s/.*-//; 
print $x;
[download]

This returns everything after the dash, which is what I want.

Comment on How do I use a regex to parse $x = system Select or Download Code

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Re: How do I use a regex to parse $x = system by turnstep (Parson) on Jan 27, 2001 at 15:35 UTC
system returns a code indicated whether or not it succeeded. Since you want to capture the output, use backticks: my $whatisit = `whatis grep`; [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do I use a regex to parse $x = system by I0 (Priest) on Jan 28, 2001 at 22:11 UTC
perldoc -q "Why can't I get the output of a command with system()?"	[reply]