What's the difference between Perl's backticks, system, and exec?

Question

Can someone please help me? In Perl, what is the difference between:

exec \"command\";

and

system(\"command\");
         


        

Answer 1

In general I use system, open, IPC::Open2, or IPC::Open3 depending on what I want to do. The qx// operator, while simple, is too constraining in its functionality to be very useful outside of quick hacks. I find open to much handier.

system: run a command and wait for it to return

Use system when you want to run a command, don't care about its output, and don't want the Perl script to do anything until the command finishes.

#doesn't spawn a shell, arguments are passed as they are
system("command", "arg1", "arg2", "arg3");

or

#spawns a shell, arguments are interpreted by the shell, use only if you
#want the shell to do globbing (e.g. *.txt) for you or you want to redirect
#output
system("command arg1 arg2 arg3");

qx// or ``: run a command and capture its STDOUT

Use qx// when you want to run a command, capture what it writes to STDOUT, and don't want the Perl script to do anything until the command finishes.

#arguments are always processed by the shell

#in list context it returns the output as a list of lines
my @lines = qx/command arg1 arg2 arg3/;

#in scalar context it returns the output as one string
my $output = qx/command arg1 arg2 arg3/;

exec: replace the current process with another process.

Use exec along with fork when you want to run a command, don't care about its output, and don't want to wait for it to return. system is really just

sub my_system {
    die "could not fork\n" unless defined(my $pid = fork);
    return waitpid $pid, 0 if $pid; #parent waits for child
    exec @_; #replace child with new process
}

You may also want to read the waitpid and perlipc manuals.

open: run a process and create a pipe to its STDIN or STDERR

Use open when you want to write data to a process's STDIN or read data from a process's STDOUT (but not both at the same time).

#read from a gzip file as if it were a normal file
open my $read_fh, "-|", "gzip", "-d", $filename
    or die "could not open $filename: $!";

#write to a gzip compressed file as if were a normal file
open my $write_fh, "|-", "gzip", $filename
    or die "could not open $filename: $!";

IPC::Open2: run a process and create a pipe to both STDIN and STDOUT

Use IPC::Open2 when you need to read from and write to a process's STDIN and STDOUT.

use IPC::Open2;

open2 my $out, my $in, "/usr/bin/bc"
    or die "could not run bc";

print $in "5+6\n";

my $answer = <$out>;

IPC::Open3: run a process and create a pipe to STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR

use IPC::Open3 when you need to capture all three standard file handles of the process. I would write an example, but it works mostly the same way IPC::Open2 does, but with a slightly different order to the arguments and a third file handle.