in reply to system call how-to

In your shell script, you build a list of files and strip off the directory part of each file with basename, whereas in your perl snippet you simply pass the string /urs/bin/* directly to whatis.

Not quite the same, is it? For basename in perl, see File::Basename. whatis doesn't work with the full path to a binary.

Since you invoke system with a list (as opposed to: with a string containing whitespace), no shell is involved, so /usr/bin/* is not even expanded.

--shmem 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom