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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