I am having an issue with retrieving the correct information when attempting to run a shell command. When i run the command on the server i get the correct output, but i do not get the same when it is run through a perl script.
$test = `pkginfo | grep TestPackage | awk '{print $2}'`;
print "$test\n";
the output when running directly from the shell is:
TestPackage
While the output from the perl script is:
application TestPackage Description
Why would this be different?
The $2 is being interpolated by perl so that awk is only seeing the string print. Try:
$test = qx( pkginfo | awk '/TestPackage/{print \$2}' );
print "$test";
You can also prevent the interpolation by using single quotes as the delimiter to qx:
$test = qx' pkginfo | awk \'/TestPackage/{print $2}\' ';
Note that $test will have a trailing newline unless you chop it.
But, invoking awk from perl is not very perlish. Although using awk feels a lot cleaner, it may be better to do something like:
@test = map { m/^\S+\s+(\S+)/; $_ = $1 } grep { /TestPackage/ } qx( pkginfo );
