Hi, I thought: 'perl is pretty eclectic, and it's usually simpler than it looks'. Let's give it a try:
The following does what you want from an AIX 5.3 (perl 5.8.2) command line perl -e'print system("ls -l")' These are quotes and apostrophes. No "backticks." On 3/11/09 2:36 PM, "neckha...@penntraffic.com" <neckha...@penntraffic.com> wrote: Hi guys, I am starting to learn Perl as the ksh scripting language (which I don't know either) looks less than powerful. I have used C many years ago, and write my stuff in REXX on a mainframe, so Perl looks like the best of both worlds. My environment is AIX 5.3 running some sort of 5.8 PERL. Oh hell, let me check..... 5.8.2. Most of the documentation and tutorials I find are for version 5.10 so I am running into the stuff in the manuals and tutorials that do not exist in 5.8. As a starting project to learn the language, I want to execute an AIX command and be able to read the output of the command in the script. EXEC doesn't work, because the program ends at the EXEC statement. SYSTEM does not appear to be available at the 5.8.2 level. I tried what usually works in other scripting languages of just putting the command in quotes. Putting "ls" in the script actually executes the command, and sends the output to the terminal. I want the output in a file, so I tried "ls > out" and I get an error (shown below). I also tried to OPEN, PRINT then CLOSE a file, but the OPEN appears to fail as if the function is not recignized, and no form of the OPEN statement seems to work. I have included the script and results below. This seems like it should be simple, but something escapes me. Thanks, Neal Script: #/usr/bin/env perl -w "ls > out"; print "RC = $?"; open OUTFILE, '< out' or die 'problem'; print while <OUTFILE>; close (OUTFILE); Results: test.pl[2]: ls > out: not found. RC = 127 test.pl[4]: open: not found. test.pl[5]: 0403-057 Syntax error at line 6 : `;' is not expected. -- Neal Elected officials should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers. That way it would be easier to identify their corporate sponsors.