MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Executing Programs

This section describes how to execute programs from the command line. You can use this information to run programs that you obtain from the recipes distribution or that you write yourself. The first set of instructions applies to scripts written in Perl, Ruby, PHP, or Python. A second set of instructions applies to Java programs.

The example programs can be found in the progdemo directory of the recipes distribution.

Executing Perl, Ruby, PHP, or Python Scripts

The following discussion shows how to execute scripts, using Perl for the examples. However, the principles are similar for Ruby, PHP, and Python scripts.

Begin with an example script named perldemo.pl that consists of a simple print statement:

print "I am a Perl program.\n";

A script-execution method that works on any platform is to invoke the perl program and tell it the name of the script to run:

%perl perldemo.pl
I am a Perl program.

For a script written in another language, invoke the ruby, php, or python program.

It’s also possible to set up a script so that it is directly executable. The procedure is different for Unix and Windows. Both procedures are described here.

On Unix, to make a script directly executable, include a line at the top of the file that begins with #! and that specifies the pathname of the program that should execute the script. Here is a script named perldemo2.pl with a #! line that names the perl program (if perl has a different location on your system, you’ll need to change the pathname): ...