Suppress STDOUT of a called program

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

how can I prevent the STDOUT of a program my script is running? I thought I could do this by running it as a background process, but whatever I was doing failed me. Maybe I was doing it wrong, because I am fairly new to Perl.

The script is initiated from the command line, and the program I am running is Nmap (I am port scanning and parsing the results in a way nontechnical clients can understand). I would like to replace the STDOUT results that Nmap presents the user with my own results, or a status message (i.e "test 1 complete - XX devices discovered running SMTP")

Comment on Suppress STDOUT of a called program

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Re: Suppress STDOUT of a called program by Joost (Canon) on May 16, 2007 at 21:49 UTC
Running a program in the background doesn't suppress STDOUT. If you just want to suppress the output and not do anything with it you can redirect it to /dev/null: `system("/some/program >/dev/null");` [download] If you want to capture its output to process it, the easiest way is to use `` quotes: my $output = `/some/program`; [download] If your program has a lot of output that is better captured as it arrives you can use piped open: `open(my $handle, "/some/program\|") or die; while (<$handle>) { # do stuff with a line }` [download] See also perlopentut and perlipc. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Suppress STDOUT of a called program by jcoaps (Initiate) on May 16, 2007 at 23:01 UTC
That was too easy...next time I'll ask a harder question. For anybody else who has the same question as me...NUL is the windows equivalent of /dev/null.	[reply]
Re^3: Suppress STDOUT of a called program by chromatic (Archbishop) on May 17, 2007 at 03:04 UTC
`File::Spec->devnull()` is the cross-platform way to get /dev/null.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Suppress STDOUT of a called program by johngg (Canon) on May 16, 2007 at 21:56 UTC
You could open a filehandle to read the nmap command and read each line in a loop. That way your script receives the command output, not the user, and you can parse the results and sanitise them for consumption by your clients. Something like `use strict; use warnings; my $nmapCmd = q{/path/to/nmap -and -any -args}; open my $nmapFH, q{-\|}, $nmapCmd or die qq{fork: $nmapCmd: $!\n}; while ( <$nmapFH> ) { chomp; # Do something with nmap output here ... print qq{Sanitised stuff for user\n}; } close $nmapFH or die qq{close: $nmapCmd: $!\n};` [download] I hope this is of use. Cheers, JohnGG	[reply] [d/l]