This is kind of obvious in retrospect; but just FYI, if you want to capture external command outputs in Perl just like in the shell (and load them into variables etc.) you can open STDOUT for input via another file handle: Code: open $capture, "<&STDOUT"; # Note that invoking system() on a list does not spawn a subshell system(qw(echo foo bar baz)); chomp($foo = <$capture>); if ($foo == "foo bar baz") { print "Got it!\n"; } will print Code: foo bar baz Got it! Among other things this might provide an alternative to backticks (which spawn a subshell, which may not be desirable). This should be doable easily in other languages (in fact Python seems to have much better facilities for it, go figure). Point is though, if an external command's output is not piped or redirected, it goes to STDOUT and STDERR, and you can read from those just like from any other file descriptors - and then load the data into variables to use however you want. Edit: and yeah, like I said this should have been obvious in retrospect. But Googling for ways of grabbing command output without backticks, there are lots of threads where nobody mentions anything like this, so...
... Of course this is the hacky way of doing it, there's a better way: http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/lecture4/processes/opens.html
