Capturing command outputs

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

Hi all, I'm seeking enlightenment on a question that I cannot find a solution to anywhere. I'm new to Perl programming, but use C and Java. Please look at a sample line of code and tell me where I'm going wrong. This code does display the output from file in the terminal, but I want to capture this output to a scalar for further processing.


$type = system 'file', "/home/patt/DCUProject/cli.pl";
[download]

The output it produces is:


/home/patt/DCUProject/cli.pl: ASCII English text
[download]

It is this I want to capture, especially the file characteristics - ASCII English text. Thanking you in advance...

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Re: Capturing command outputs by moritz (Cardinal) on May 10, 2009 at 11:35 UTC
Use qx or backticks instead of system.	[reply]
Re^2: Capturing command outputs by patt (Scribe) on May 10, 2009 at 13:56 UTC
Many thanks moritz. I am getting what I wanted now. I was trying qx, but in this fashion: `system qx(file /home/patt/DCUProject/cli.pl);` [download] It never dawned on me to exclude 'system' from the line of code. I had tried backticks, but they won't work for some reason.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Capturing command outputs by jethro (Monsignor) on May 10, 2009 at 11:42 UTC
Capturing command output can be done with backticks $type= `file /home/patt/DCUProject/cli.pl`. Another possibility is to open a pipe, see 'perldoc -f open'	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Capturing command outputs by Perlbotics (Archbishop) on May 10, 2009 at 19:36 UTC
There's also an XS module available which might be a useful alternative: File::LibMagic Example (shameless theft from the docs): `use File::LibMagic ':easy'; print MagicBuffer("Hello World\n"),"\n"; # returns "ASCII text" print MagicFile("/bin/ls"),"\n"; # returns "ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 +(SYSV)" # on my system` [download] HTH	[reply] [d/l]