Shell command inside Perl Script

Question

All

I have following shell command working as per expectation on shell but not working when invoked inside perl

Shell command:

grep -P -s -irl --include \*.v "\s+hello\s?[(].*" <PATH> 

working fine

Inside Perl:

$inst_search = `grep -P -s -irl --include \*.v "\s+$inst\s?[(].*" @plt_dirs`;

not working

I am suspecting i am missing something with regexp inside grep..please correct me !

Thanks, Vivek

Answer 1

Try this one:

$inst_search = qx#grep -P -s -irl --include \*.v "\s+$inst\s?[(].*" @plt_dirs#;

Or use any other non-alphanumeric character instead of "#" for quoting.

Answer 2

Perl will escape special shell characters when calling exec/system/qx (or backticks) with a string.

Try using the exec or system functions, but passing a list, eg

system('grep', '-P', '-s', '-irl', '--include', '\*.v', '"\s+hello\s?[(].*"', @plt_dirs);

You may also want to look at a module that does some of the error handling for you, like IPC::System::Simple.