Dear monks,

I have a small perl script, myscript.pl called by a c program via the system command with command line arguments, as follows:

myscript.pl set <variable_name> <variable_value>

The code of myscript.pl is very basic, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my ($command, $pathname, $value);

$command = shift @ARGV;
$pathname = shift @ARGV;
if (defined $pathname and $pathname ne '') {
       if (($command eq "set") or ($command eq "add") or ($command eq 
+"del"))
        {
                $value = shift @ARGV;
        }
        else .....
}
...
[download]

I found that if <variable_value> is a string starting with a hash (#), then $value remains undefined. If I enclose the string in "", then $value is properly defined. However, I do not have (easy) access to the c program that calls myscript.pl.

Is there another way to solve this?

Cheers,
Athanasia

Update : Thanks to all who responded to my query. All suggested solutions helped me address the issue in one way or another.