in reply to Switching from backticks to open

For best practice, you'll always want to keep your arguments in array-form. For instance, keep @ARGV as-is, and pass it to system, exec, open, etc. as a LIST. This will ensure you're handling arguments correctly. You'll find that any other way is less-than-ideal and prone to problems.

With that said, let's say you already have your arguments as a string. To emulate shell parsing, in order to get back an array of arguments:
use Text::ParseWords; # core module

my $args = q(-w 70 -c 80 -r 'bla bla');

my @ARGS = shellwords($args);

# this is how to keep single-quotes
# [but it's probably not what you want for open()]

my @ARGS2 = parse_line('\s+', 1, $args);

[download]

See Text::ParseWords.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Switching from backticks to open
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 03, 2008 at 09:04 UTC

    Using Text::ParseWords will introduce some incompatibilities.

    • shellwords parses the text in a manner "similar to most Unix shells". Backticks use the bourne shell, not "most unix shells".

    • Redirection and other shell instructions are silently treated as arguments instead of resulting in an error.

    • Environment and special variables won't be interpolated.

    • Globs won't be expanded.

    Update: Added last item.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Yes, with Text::ParseWords, we'll lose all "shell-magic" interpretation. That means no $SHELL_VARIABLE expansion, globs/redirection/pipe operators are treated as plain arguments, etc.

      shellwords($text) is merely parsing $text into words as-is. Care should be taken to manually expand globs or $SHELL_VARIABLES embedded in the literal $text. Caution: Beyond the very simple case, it is best to avoid going down the path of recreating shell behavior using shellwords().
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re^2: Switching from backticks to open
by Eule (Novice) on Nov 03, 2008 at 11:05 UTC
    Thanks - that was exactly the missing part!
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom