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

I am using backticks to access MSDos (on winnt) to call the Visual C++ compiler. Something like $msg=`cl -c myprog.c`. This fails with message : Program too big to fit in memory. If I do my command directly on MSDos command line it works fine. I have tried everything under the sun to fix this. ( I do the call from perl because it is easiest to construct the compiler switches etc using perl ). Any help or ideas would be hugely appreciated ...

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Re: memory restiction ?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 17, 2000 at 22:16 UTC
    Hmm, using backticks will grab all error messages from the child process. Why not use system and redirect output from the compiler to a temporary file (within the string passed to system)? If there are errors returned, display the temporary file with Perl.
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RE: memory restiction ?
by ender (Novice) on Mar 17, 2000 at 22:15 UTC
    I'm not sure you're using perl for the right reasons here. It sounds like what you're looking for is a Makefile? You want to build a lot of stuff given different compiler options?
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Re: memory restriction ?
by turnstep (Parson) on Mar 25, 2000 at 00:07 UTC
    Tough one. MSDOS is a pain. Have you tried allocating more memory for the DOS box? Worse case scenario, you could have perl write a batch file (cl -c myprog.c > tmpfile) and run that in a separate window, then run your program on the results. Of course, you could do that all in the same window with an ugly batch file: 
    @ECHO OFF
perl foobar.pl makebat ## creates TMP.BAT (the compiler)
TMP.BAT ## writes it's output to TMP.TXT
perl foobar.pl readresults

    [download]
    Bleh. Better to just mess with the memory. You might also see if there is anyway you can get C++ to be more "memory friendly"
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[d/l]

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