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Capturing Output

The system function does have a small shortcoming: It doesn't offer any particularly good way to capture the command's output and bring it into Perl for analysis. To do so in a roundabout way, you could use this workaround:

# 'ls' and 'dir' used for example only. opendir/readdir
# would be more efficient in most cases.
system("dir > outfile");    # Use "ls" instead of "dir" for Unix
open(OF, "outfile") || die "Cannot open output: $!";
@data=<OF>;
close(OF);–

In the preceding snippet, the command run by system has its output redirected to a file called outfile. The file is then opened and read into an array. The array @data now contains the output of the dir command.

This method is messy and not too clever. Not surprisingly, Perl ...