Shell(l) Perl Programmers Reference Guide Shell(l) NAME Shell - run shell commands transparently within perl SYNOPSIS See below. DESCRIPTION Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 16:18:16 -0700 Message-Id: <9409222318.AA17072@scalpel.netlabs.com> To: perl5-porters@isu.edu From: Larry Wall <lwall@scalpel.netlabs.com> Subject: a new module I just wrote Here's one that'll whack your mind a little out. #!/usr/bin/perl use Shell; $foo = echo("howdy", "<funny>", "world"); print $foo; $passwd = cat("</etc/passwd"); print $passwd; sub ps; print ps -ww; cp("/etc/passwd", "/tmp/passwd"); That's maybe too gonzo. It actually exports an AUTOLOAD to the current package (and uncovered a bug in Beta 3, by the way). Maybe the usual usage should be use Shell qw(echo cat ps cp); Larry If you set $Shell::capture_stderr to 1, the module will attempt to capture the STDERR of the process as well. The module now should work on Win32. Jenda There seemed to be a problem where all arguments to a shell command were quoted before being executed. As in the following example: cat('</etc/passwd'); ls('*.pl'); really turned into: cat '</etc/passwd' ls '*.pl' instead of: cat </etc/passwd ls *.pl and of course, this is wrong. I have fixed this bug, it was brought up by Wolfgang Laun [ID 20000326.008] Casey OBJECT ORIENTED SYNTAX Shell now has an OO interface. Good for namespace conser- vation and shell representation. use Shell; my $sh = Shell->new; print $sh->ls; Casey AUTHOR Larry Wall Changes by Jenda@Krynicky.cz and Dave Cottle <d.cot- tle@csc.canterbury.ac.nz> Changes and bug fixes by Casey Tweten <crt@kiski.net> perl v5.6.1 2001-02-23 Shell(l)