On Jun 4, Mat Harris said: >I want to issue the command to the command line, including the values of >these vars. I have tried backticking and the system('command here') but >they just send the vars as empty strings.
Here's the program: #!/usr/bin/perl $date = `date +%y%m%e`; $backup_dest = "/backup/home/".$date."-monthly"; $archive_dest = "/backup/home/archives/".$date."-monthly"; $backup_target = "/home/"; $level = "0"; $cmd = "dump -$level -u -A $archive_dest -f $backup_dest -j 9 $backup_target"; `$cmd`; The primary problem I see is that $date has a newline at the end of it. Why? Because the 'date' command returns a string with a trailing on its end. You could do chomp($date = `date +%y%m%e`); Another problem is that the %e format uses a SPACE. Today's date is output as 0206 4 which will screw up your call to dump, I bet. You should use a zero-padded format. However, you don't really need to use the 'date' command. Perl has functions you can use: my ($day, $mon, $year) = (localtime)[3,4,5]; # perldoc -f localtime my $date = sprintf "%02d%02%02d", $year % 100, $mon + 1, $day; my $level = 0; my $backup_dest = "/backup/home/$date-monthly"; my $archive_dest = "/backup/home/archives/$date-monthly"; my $backup_target = "/home/"; Then call `dump ...` however you want. -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/ RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.cpan.org/ ** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 ** <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course. [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]