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CONTENTS

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 conservation 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.cottle@csc.canterbury.ac.nz>

Changes and bug fixes by Casey West <casey@geeknest.com>