Perl escaping argument for bash execution

Question

I\'ve written some code in Perl which executes some bash command within its execution. My problem was when bash command attributes contained white space inside which failed

Answer 1

Don't use backticks to keep your string away from the shell, and hence all the quoting issues:

system 'echo', $var;

---

You write:

I need stdout from this command unfortunately. Other thing is that variables are used in a lil bit complicated command which uses many pipes and stuff: echo $var | sed | grep | awk | and so on... and so on...

You might want to investigate with something like this (untested, largely cribbed from the IPC::Open3 perldoc)

use IPC::Open3;
use Symbol 'gensym';

my ($wtr, $rdr, $err);
$err = gensym;
my $pid = open3($wtr, $rdr, $err, 'sed|grep|awk|and so on');
print $wtr $var;
close $wtr;
my $output = <$rdr>;
waitpid $pid, 0;

If your pipeline is very messy, store it in a shell script file, and invoke that script from perl.