The easiest way is to use backticks (or qx):

my $number = "2301";
my @output = `./retrive $number`;
chomp @output; # remove line endings
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The second step would be then to separate the keys and values into pairs. This is easiest done with split:

use Data::Dumper;
my %data;
for my $line (@output) {
    my ($key, $value) = split /:/, $line, 2;
    $data{ $key } = $value;
};
print Dumper \%data;
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Thanks for your quick reply. I will give it a try. Now suppose I want to set two parameters, say

my $name=;
my $status;
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Is there a way of assigning them inside a for loop, say using switch or if-else

Sam

No, there basically is no way to assign your variables that way. Well, you could store the names and references in a hash and then use that:

my ($name, $status, $cid);
my %vars = (
    'NAME' => \$name,
    'CID'  => \$cid,
    'STATUS' => \$status,    
);

for my $line (@output) {
    my ($key, $val) = split /:/, $line, 2;
    if ($vars{ $key }) {
        ${ $vars{ $key } } = $val;
    } else {
        warn "Unknown key '$key', discarded";
    };
};
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I'm not sure whether that's worth the trouble though.

my ( $name, $status ) = `./retrive 2301` =~ /(?=CID:\s*(.+))(?=STATUS:
+\s*(.+))/;
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I am very grateful for your replies. I will give it a short and revert

Sam

I have tried both codes and all give me the output to the console. What i now want is to assign the value to my variable so that i can do more manipulation with the data, say my $newstatus=$status;


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my ( $name, $status ) = `./retrieve 2301` =~ /(?=CID:\s*(.+))(?=STATUS
+:+\s*(.+))/;

my $newstatus $status; //Just be able to access the variable with data
print $newstatus;
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Hi, you can get the result by using backquotes like:

my @output = `./retrive 2301`;
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Then, you can use a regular expression to fill your variables:

my $cid="";
foreach (@output)
{ if ($_ =~/^CID: (.*)/)
  { $cid=$1; 
  }
}
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If performance is an issue, you can precompile this regular expression so Perl doesnt have to do this every time in the loop. Here is a complete little program:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my @output = `./retrive 2301`;
my $cid="";
my $r_regex = qr/^CID: (.*)/;
foreach (@output)
{ if ($_ =~ $r_regex)
  { $cid=$1; 
  }
}
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