How to load the return of system into a variable?

[veteq]

Is there a way to load the return of system into a variable?

e.g.

sysreturn = system("ls -l |wc -l")

thank you.

 

[Kirsle]

If you use the `` command rather than system, it should return the output.

sysreturn = `ls -l |wc -l';

http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.7/pod/perlop.pod

 

[veteq]

thank you for the quick reply. I tried the search but I was searching for the wrong command.

thank you

 

[veteq]

sorry but that didn't work, all it returned is the content of the '' not the number of lines. am I missing something?

thanks

 

[Kirsle]

A kinda dodgy approach I used to use is to open a filehandle, select it, then do the system commands.

Kinda along the lines of...

open (CAPTOR, ">./output.txt");
select CAPTOR;
system ("commands");
select STDOUT;
close (CAPTOR);

And then open output.txt for reading.

 

[stevexff]

my @stuff = qx[ls -l];
print scalar @stuff;

In this instance you don't need the wc -l because the number of files is the count of items in the @stuff array. I tend to prefer qx[...] to backticks, it's just easier to read...