[ILUG] Perl Question.

[Niall O Broin]

On 8 Jun 2005, at 13:22, Kevin O'Riordan wrote:

>>> As Niall pointed out, you could probably join the arguments together
>>> as a single string before calling system() with that single argument.
>>> Then the shell would get to parse the line ...
>
>> As the man page you quoted points out, the shell is only involved when
>> the command line for system contains shell metacharacters. Martin's
>> didn't so his perl program won't use the shell.
>
> According to the bash manpage, an unquoted space character itself is a
> shell metacharacter.  A little testing shows that you're right though 
> --
> the shell is not called when the example arguments are joined together.
> I guess perl has it's own idea of what shell metacharacters are?

I guess an unquoted space character itself is a shell metacharacter 
only in so far as it acts as a separator. perl doesn't worry about 
that, because if a system command line has no OTHER shell 
metacharacters, perl splits the command line on whitespace, and calls 
execvp directly with the results of that split.


Niall