[ale] System in Perl

[Jay Loden]

Terry Bailey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any way to place the results of the following into a Perl 
> variable without opening and closing  a file?  In addition, this 
> would be used in Javascript function.
> 
> 		system("stat test | grep -i access | grep -v Uid | cut -b8-27");

In addition to what Chris already suggested about using Perl's stat instead of calling shell commands unnecessarily...

Perl has a built-in mechanism for exactly this purpose, which is the backticks operator. For instance, using the below in a file called stat.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $stat_result = `stat test | grep -i access | grep -v Uid | cut -b8-27`;
print "$stat_result\n";


Now running it on an example test file:

[jloden at dell ~]$ touch test
[jloden at dell ~]$ perl stat.pl 
 2007-07-27 02:39:13

That being said, I still recommend using a built in function for stat() instead, it's a lot cleaner, more portable, and less fragile.

-Jay