To answer question one, consult your web server documentation for "Server-Side Includes". If you're using Apache, look here.

To run another perl script (or another program) from within a perl script, capturing the output, read perlipc.

To use a subroutine that exists in another script, you're going to have to read up on how to construct Perl modules (pacakges), or how the require statement works. It's not trivial to reach into another script and invoke another subroutine, but that's a part of the path to Perl knowledge yet ahead of you. Why spoil the fun here?

For number 2), you'll need a require statement in your script. Be sure to append any required file with a "1;". If it's a nice module, you can use it.

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

Your first question seems like you are talking about CGI (Common Gateway Interface), which is a way of creating dynamic HTML content.

The actual mechanics to call a CGI script from a form is:

Make sure to look at the <form> and <input> HTML tags. Make sure to scope out Ovid's CGI course at: http://www.easystreet.com/~ovid/cgi_course.

Good Luck!

packing up for a ski trip....not much time...last perlmonk session for over a week...have to write something.....(perl withdrawals impending), so I haven't tested...but it should be close for a beginning of a "perl script that prints a page that can be used to fire off the perl script to do something"

hell, if it was perfect you would have the fun of debugging it, eh? :-)

good luck

#!/usr/bin/perl
$|++;
use strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI();
my $thingtodo = $q->param("thingtodo");
print $q->header();
print $q->starthtml();
print qq(<form method=post action="/dir/cgi-bin/this.pl");
if ( $thingtodo eq "somethingnew" ) {
  somethingnew();
else
  defaultpage();
}
print qq(</form>);
$q->end_html();
exit;

sub defaultpage {
  print $q->p("default page");
  print <<EOHTML;
     <input type=hidden name=thingtodo value=somethingnew>
     <input type=submit value="press for something new">
EOHTML
;
}
sub somethingnew {
  print $q->("something new");
  print <<EOHTML;
    <input type=submit value="press to go home">
EOHTML
;  
}
[download]

oh yeah, mixed some styles for outputting html...timtowtdi

`perl myscript.pl`;

You can even capture the output of the other perl script if any as in:

my $output = `perl myscript.pl`;

As Larry Wall always says, "There's more than one way to do it."

Avoid `back-ticks` unless you need to get at the output (as you do in your second example). Using back-ticks in a void context only makes perl do extra work unnecessarily. In this case, I'd use system instead.

Why can't backticks use defined(wantarray) to find out if they where called in a void context, and if so, do not return or capture the output? (Redirecting to /dev/null comes to mind)