NAME

system - run a separate program

SYNOPSIS

system LIST

system PROGRAM LIST

DESCRIPTION

Does exactly the same thing as exec LIST, except that a fork is done first, and the parent process waits for the child process to complete. 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.

Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before any operation that may do a fork, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see the perlport manpage). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the autoflush() method of IO::Handle on any open handles.

The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the wait call. To get the actual exit value divide by 256. See also exec in the perlfunc manpage. This is not what you want to use to capture the output from a command, for that you should use merely backticks or qx//, as described in `STRING` in the perlop manpage. Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program (inspect $! for the reason).

Like exec, system allows you to lie to a program about its name if you use the system PROGRAM LIST syntax. Again, see exec in the perlfunc manpage.

Because system and backticks block SIGINT and SIGQUIT, killing the program they're running doesn't actually interrupt your program.

    @args = ("command", "arg1", "arg2");
    system(@args) == 0
         or die "system @args failed: $?"

You can check all the failure possibilities by inspecting $? like this:

    $exit_value  = $? >> 8;
    $signal_num  = $? & 127;
    $dumped_core = $? & 128;

When the arguments get executed via the system shell, results and return codes will be subject to its quirks and capabilities. See `STRING` in the perlop manpage and exec in the perlfunc manpage for details.