Perl can of course start other programs. Depending
on whether you want to just start the other program
and let your script finish or start the program and
capture output and maybe start another program after
that, there are many options for you to use :
- exec() abandons the
current program and starts another program
- system() starts
the other program, waits for it to complete its run
and then continues your current program
- fork() starts the
current program a second time so that you have
two instances of your program running
The man pages have examples for every one of these
possibilities, but the one you will be most likely
looking for is exec(),
as all the other functions can be simulated using
exec().
If you simply want to start another program
with a fixed command line, wait for it to finish
and capture all output, you can use the following
code (untested) :
$output = `/path/to/program -and -some -parameters`;
Note that, depending on the operating system and
shell, not everything will work as expected.
Under Win32, you can't start Perl scripts directly,
you have to start perl.exe and give
-wT script.pl as the command line parameters.
The line given to `` will also be subject to
UNIX shell wildcard expansion, so you have to be very carefull
in security sensitive situations when using variables
in the `` part. A short example :
$filename = @ARGV[1];
$output = `/bin/program $filename`;
If a user then gives (for example) "/dev/null; rm -rf /* &"
as the first parameter, the shell will start rm
as a second process, which might be a security hole when
using this in a CGI application.
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