system
- system PROGRAM LIST
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 exit. 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 toexecvp
, which is more efficient. On Windows, only thesystem PROGRAM LIST
syntax will reliably avoid using the shell;system LIST
, even with more than one element, will fall back to the shell if the first spawn fails.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 perlport). To be safe, you may need to set
$|
($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call theautoflush()
method ofIO::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, shift right by eight (see below). See also exec. This is not what you want to use to capture the output from a command; for that you should use merely backticks orqx//
, as described in `STRING` in perlop. Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program or an error of the wait(2) system call (inspect $! for the reason).If you'd like to make
system
(and many other bits of Perl) die on error, have a look at the autodie pragma.Like
exec
,system
allows you to lie to a program about its name if you use thesystem PROGRAM LIST
syntax. Again, see exec.Since
SIGINT
andSIGQUIT
are ignored during the execution ofsystem
, if you expect your program to terminate on receipt of these signals you will need to arrange to do so yourself based on the return value.If you'd like to manually inspect
system
's failure, you can check all possible failure modes by inspecting$?
like this:Alternatively, you may inspect the value of
${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}
with theW*()
calls from the POSIX module.When
system
's arguments are executed indirectly by the shell, results and return codes are subject to its quirks. See `STRING` in perlop and exec for details.Since
system
does afork
andwait
it may affect aSIGCHLD
handler. See perlipc for details.Portability issues: system in perlport.