Firstly, please forgive me if this isn't the right place for asking this
question. I tried a couple of programmer's forums but up to now, my question
hasn't even gained one answer! And yet it seems like a simple (and probably
very common) requirement. I'm hoping that someone here will take pity on me!
I've been using Strawberry perl for about 6 months and I'm generally happy with
it. The one thing I just can't seem to make it do is to run an external
program and capture that program's output to a file. I came across perl's
'system' command. Let's say I add these lines to a perl script:-
@my_command = ( "the_exe_name", "arg1", "arg2", "etc" );
system(@my_command);
If I now open a DOS window and run the perl script, sure enough, it runs
'the_exe_name'. And if my exe produces any text output I can see that output
in my DOS window.. Suppose my perl script is called "my_perl_script.pl". If I
try to redirect its text output (like this) something interesting happens:-
my_perl_script.pl > output.txt
The above seems to work in Windows 7. However, it doesn't work in Windows 8 or
Windows XP. In both cases, the file "output.txt" does get created. And in
both cases I no longer see the exe's output text in my DOS window (i.e. as if
it's getting redirected to the file). But at the end of the process (in both
cases) output.txt will be an empty file. :-(
My next thought was to handle any redirection within the actual perl script -
i.e.
@my_command = ( "the_exe_name", "arg1", "arg2", "etc" ">", "output.txt"
);
system(@my_command);
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work either (again, it always creates an
empty file).
Is there a way to achieve this using Strawberry perl? Or am I making some
rookie mistake here? Admittedly I'm not very experienced with perl but I'm
amazed that such a simple task seems to defeat it :-(
Thanks for any help.
John
