Re: perl test

On Sat, 7 Sep 2024 23:11:41 +0000, Retro Guy wrote:

On Sat, 7 Sep 2024 22:59:41 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

If you want to pass arguments to an external program, don’t bother
going through a shell if you can help it. Invoke the program and pass
the command-line arguments directly, then you don’t have to worry about
shell specials.

 
That would be my preference, but I'm not sure how to do that from Perl.

From the perlfunc(1) man page:

   system LIST
   system PROGRAM LIST
       Does exactly the same thing as "exec", except that a fork
       is done first and the parent process waits for the child
       process to exit. Note that argument processing varies
       depending on the number of arguments. If there is more than
       one argument in LIST, or if LIST is an array with more than
       one value, starts the program given by the first element of
       the list with arguments given by the rest of the list. If
       there is only one scalar argument, the argument is checked
       for shell metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire
       argument is passed to the system's command shell for
       parsing (this is "/bin/sh -c" on Unix platforms, but varies
       on other platforms). If there are no shell metacharacters
       in the argument, it is split into words and passed directly
       to "execvp", which is more efficient.