Perl code help for a newbie

Zeta

Hey guys,

I am new to the whole perl thing and was wondering: Is it possible to get perl to execute something via the command line and hold the results as a variable? For instance I have a perl script that is going to run in unix and at a certain point i want the perl script to use the command line to execute 'cksum $filename' in order to do a checksum on a certain file and save the results to a variable. The problem is i have no idea how to make perl use the command line. Any help would be great.

Thanks.

Lewisham

Yes.

http://sial.org/howto/perl/backticks/

Rhino

yea, few ways to do it:

my $output = `cksum $filename`;
print ("Cksum outputted: $output\n");

# or also this works:
system("chksum", "$filename");

I forget how to get the system output though.