$ cat test.pl
my $pid = 5892;
my $not = system("top -H -p $pid -n 1 | grep myprocess | wc -l");
print "not = $not\n";
$ perl test.pl
11
not = 0
$
I want to capture the result i.e. 11 into a variable. How can I do that?
From Perlfaq8:
You're confusing the purpose of system() and backticks (``). system() runs a command and returns exit status information (as a 16 bit value: the low 7 bits are the signal the process died from, if any, and the high 8 bits are the actual exit value). Backticks (``) run a command and return what it sent to STDOUT.
$exit_status = system("mail-users");
$output_string = `ls`;
There are many ways to execute external commands from Perl. The most commons with their meanings are:
system() : you want to execute a command and don't want to capture its output
exec: you don't want to return to the
calling perl script
backticks : you want to capture the
output of the command
open: you want to pipe the command (as
input or output) to your script
Also see How can I capture STDERR from an external command?
The easiest way is to use the `` feature in Perl. This will execute what is inside and return what was printed to stdout:
my $pid = 5892;
my $var = `top -H -p $pid -n 1 | grep myprocess | wc -l`;
print "not = $var\n";
This should do it.
Try using qx{command} rather than backticks. To me, it's a bit better because: you can do SQL with it and not worry about escaping quotes and such. Depending on the editor and screen, my old eyes tend to miss the tiny back ticks, and it shouldn't ever have an issue with being overloaded like using angle brackets versus glob.
Using backtick or qx helps, thanks everybody for the answers. However, I found that if you use backtick or qx, the output contains trailing newline and I need to remove that. So I used chomp.
chomp($host = `hostname`);
chomp($domain = `domainname`);
$fqdn = $host.".".$domain;
More information here:
http://irouble.blogspot.in/2011/04/perl-chomp-backticks.html
Use backticks for system commands, which helps to store their results into Perl variables.
my $pid = 5892;
my $not = ``top -H -p $pid -n 1 | grep myprocess | wc -l`;
print "not = $not\n";
Also for eg. you can use IPC::Run:
use IPC::Run qw(run);
my $pid = 5892;
run [qw(top -H -n 1 -p), $pid],
'|', sub { print grep { /myprocess/ } <STDIN> },
'|', [qw(wc -l)],
'>', \my $out;
print $out;
processes are running without bash subprocess
can be piped to perl subs
very similar to shell
Related
If multiple arguments are passed to perl's system function then the shell expansion will not work:
# COMMAND
$ perl -e 'my $s="*"; system("echo", "$s" )'
# RESULT
*
If the command is passed as an one argument then the expansion will work:
# COMMAND
$ perl -e 'my $s="echo *"; system("$s")'
# RESULT
Desktop Documents Downloads
The system function also allows to using multiple commands and connect them using pipes. This only works when argument is passed as an one command:
# COMMAND
$ perl -e 'my $s="echo * | cat -n"; system("$s")'
# RESULT
1 Desktop Documents Downloads
How can I combine mentioned commands and use both pipes and prevent shell expansion?
I have tried:
# COMMAND
$ perl -e 'my $s="echo"; system("$s", "* | cat -n")'
# RESULT
* | cat -n
but this did not work because of reasons that I've described above (multiple arguments are not expanded). The result that I want is:
1 *
EDIT:
The problem that I'm actually facing is that when I use following command:
system("echo \"$email_message\" | mailx -s \"$email_subject\" $recipient");
Then the $email_message is expanded and it will break mailx if it contains some characters that are further expanded by shell.
system has three calling conventions:
system($SHELL_CMD)
system($PROG, #ARGS) # #ARGS>0
system( { $PROG } $NAME, #ARGS ) # #ARGS>=0
The first passes a command to the shell. It's equivalent to
system('/bin/sh', '-c', $SHELL_CMD)
The other two execute the program $PROG. system never prevents shell expansion or performs any escaping. There's simply no shell involved.
So your question is about building a shell command. If you were at the prompt, you might use
echo \* | cat -n
or
echo '*' | cat -n
to pass *. You need a function that performs the job of escaping * before interpolating it. Fortunately, one already exists: String::ShellQuote's shell_quote.
$ perl -e'
use String::ShellQuote qw( shell_quote );
my $s = "*";
my $cmd1 = shell_quote("printf", q{%s\n}, $s);
my $cmd2 = "cat -n";
my $cmd = "$cmd1 | $cmd2";
print("Executing <<$cmd>>\n");
system($cmd);
'
Executing <<printf '%s\n' '*' | cat -n>>
1 *
I used printf instead of echo since it's very hard to handle arguments starting with - in echo. Most programs accept -- to separate options from non-options, but not my echo.
All these complications beg the question: Why are you shelling out to send an email? It's usually much harder to handle errors from external programs than from libraries.
You can use open to pipe directly to mailx, without your content being interpreted by the shell:
open( my $mail, "|-", "mailx", "-s", $email_subject, $recipient );
say $mail $email_message;
close $mail;
More details can be found in open section of perlipc.
This question already has answers here:
How can I process options using Perl in -n or -p mode?
(2 answers)
Closed last year.
I often need to run some Perl one-liners for fast data manipulations, like
some_command | perl -lne 'print if /abc/'
Reading from a pipe, I don't need a loop around the command arg filenames. How can I achieve the next?
some_command | perl -lne 'print if /$ARGV[0]/' abc
This gives the error:
Can't open abc: No such file or directory.
I understand that the '-n' does the
while(<>) {.... }
around my program, and the <> takes args as filenames, but doing the next every time is a bit impractical
#/bin/sh
while read line
do
some_command | perl -lne 'BEGIN{$val=shift #ARGV} print if /$val/' "$line"
done
Is there some better way to get "inside" the Perl ONE-LINER command line arguments without getting them interpreted as filenames?
Some solutions:
perl -e'while (<STDIN>) { print if /$ARGV[0]/ }' pat
perl -e'$p = shift; while (<>) { print if /$p/ }' pat
perl -e'$p = shift; print grep /$p/, <>' pat
perl -ne'BEGIN { $p = shift } print if /$p/' pat
perl -sne'print if /$p/' -- -p=pat
PAT=pat perl -ne'print if /$ENV{PAT}/'
Of course, it might make more sense to create a pattern that's an ORing or all patterns rather than executing the same command for each pattern.
Also reasonably short:
... | expr=abc perl -lne 'print if /$ENV{expr}/'
Works in bash shell but maybe not other shells.
It depends on what you think will be in the lines you read, but you could play with:
#/bin/sh
while read line
do
some_command | perl -lne "print if /$line/"
done
Clearly, if $line might contain slashes, this is not going to fly. Then, AFAIK, you're stuck with the BEGIN block formulation.
When evaluating if(-t STDIN), does the < UNIX operator count as STDIN? If not, how do I get that data?
So someone types perl example.pl < testing.txt. This doesn't behave like data piped in via ls | ./example.pl. How can I get that behavior?
Test -p STDIN, which checks if the filehandle STDIN is attached to a pipe.
touch foo
perl -e 'print -p STDIN' < foo # nothing
cat foo | perl -e 'print -p STDIN' # 1
But I'm not sure I understand your question. In all three of these cases
1. perl -e 'print $_=<STDIN>' < <(echo foo)
2. echo foo | perl -e 'print $_=<STDIN>'
3. perl -e 'print $_=<STDIN>' # then type "foo\n" to the console
the inputs are the same and all accessible through the STDIN filehandle. In the first two cases, -t STDIN will evaluate to false, and in the second case, -p STDIN will be true.
The differences in behavior between these three cases are subtle, and usually not important. The third case, obviously, will wait until at least one line of input (terminated with "\n" or EOF) is received. The difference between the first two cases is even more subtle. When the input to your program is piped from the output of another process, you are somewhat at the mercy of that first process with respect to latency or whether that program buffers its output.
Maybe you could expand on what you mean when you say
perl example.pl < testing.txt
doesn't behave like
ls | ./example.pl
-t tests whether or not STDIN is attached to a tty.
When you pipe data to perl, it will not be attached to a tty. This should not depend on the mechanism you use to pipe (ie, whether you pipe a command using | or pipe a file using <.) However, you will have a tty attached when you run the program directly. Given the following example:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print ((-t STDIN) ? "is a tty\n" : "is not a tty\n");
You would expect the following output:
% perl ./ttytest.pl
is a tty
% perl ./ttytest.pl < somefile
is not a tty
% ls | perl ./ttytest.pl
is not a tty
I'm trying to extract all ip addresses from a file. So far, I'm just using
cat foo.txt | perl -pe 's/.*?((\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}).*/\1/'
but this also prints lines that don't contain a match. I can fix this by piping through grep, but this seems like it ought to be unnecessary, and could lead to errors if the regexes don't match up perfectly.
Is there a simpler way to accomplish this?
Try this:
cat foo.txt | perl -ne 'print if s/.*?((\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}).*/\1/'
or:
<foo.txt perl -ne 'print if s/.*?((\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}).*/\1/'
It's the shortest alternative I can think of while still using Perl.
However this way might be more correct:
<foo.txt perl -ne 'if (/((\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3})/) { print $1 . "\n" }'
If you've got grep, then just call grep directly:
grep -Po "(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}" foo.txt
You've already got a suitable answer of using grep to extract the IP addresses, but just to explain why you were seeing non-matches being printed:
perldoc perlrun will tell you about all the options you can pass Perl on the command line.
Quoting from it:
-p causes Perl to assume the following loop around your program, which makes it
iterate over filename arguments somewhat like sed:
LINE:
while (<>) {
... # your program goes here
} continue {
print or die "-p destination: $!\n";
}
You could have used the -n switch instead, which does similar, but does not automatically print, for example:
cat foo.txt | perl -ne '/((?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3})/ and print $1'
Also, there's no need to use cat; Perl will open and read the filenames you give it, so you could say e.g.:
perl -ne '/((?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3})/ and print $1' foo.txt
ruby -0777 -ne 'puts $_.scan(/((?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3})/)' file
I've been trying to grep an exact shell 'variable' using word boundaries,
grep "\<$variable\>" file.txt
but haven't managed to; I've tried everything else but haven't succeeded.
Actually I'm invoking grep from a Perl script:
$attrval=`/usr/bin/grep "\<$_[0]\>" $upgradetmpdir/fullConfiguration.txt`
$_[0] and $upgradetmpdir/fullConfiguration.txt contains some matching "text".
But $attrval is empty after the operation.
#OP, you should do that 'grepping' in Perl. don't call system commands unnecessarily unless there is no choice.
$mysearch="pattern";
while (<>){
chomp;
#s = split /\s+/;
foreach my $line (#s){
if ($line eq $mysearch){
print "found: $line\n";
}
}
}
I'm not seeing the problem here:
file.txt:
hello
hi
anotherline
Now,
mala#human ~ $ export GREPVAR="hi"
mala#human ~ $ echo $GREPVAR
hi
mala#human ~ $ grep "\<$GREPVAR\>" file.txt
hi
What exactly isn't working for you?
Not every grep supports the ex(1) / vi(1) word boundary syntax.
I think I would just do:
grep -w "$variable" ...
Using single quotes works for me in tcsh:
grep '<$variable>' file.txt
I am assuming your input file contains the literal string: <$variable>
If variable=foo are you trying to grep for "foo"? If so, it works for me. If you're trying to grep for the variable named "$variable", then change the quotes to single quotes.
On a recent linux it works as expected. Do could try egrep instead
Say you have
$ cat file.txt
This line has $variable
DO NOT PRINT ME! $variableNope
$variable also
Then with the following program
#! /usr/bin/perl -l
use warnings;
use strict;
system("grep", "-P", '\$variable\b', "file.txt") == 0
or warn "$0: grep exited " . ($? >> 8);
you'd get output of
This line has $variable
$variable also
It uses the -P switch to GNU grep that matches Perl regular expressions. The feature is still experimental, so proceed with care.
Also note the use of system LIST that bypasses shell quoting, allowing the program to specify arguments with Perl's quoting rules rather than the shell's.
You could use the -w (or --word-regexp) switch, as in
system("grep", "-w", '\$variable', "file.txt") == 0
or warn "$0: grep exited " . ($? >> 8);
to get the same result.
Using single quote it wont work. You should go for double quote
For example:
this wont work
--------------
for i in 1
do
grep '$i' file
done
this will work
--------------
for i in 1
do
grep "$i" file
done