capturing output from an internal perl command

dinsick

Hi -
I am trying use the perl command rmtree (from File:ath) to delete list of directories. I would like to capture the output from rmtree(@dirList,1,0) and store it in a variable. I was able to locate information about capture output from external commands, but I could not find any information about caputuring output from internal Perl commands. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Jay

Adam Stoller

File:ath routines use 'print' to report the information - so the only way to capture that information would probably be to set up an explicit redirect for STDOUT - something like this:

use File:ath qw(mkpath rmtree);
mkpath("/tmp/foo/bar/baz/mumble/fratz", 1, 0777);
my $tmpfile = "/tmp/foo.out";
open(OLDOUT, ">&STDOUT");
open(STDOUT, ">$tmpfile") || die " '$tmpfile' ($!)";
select(STDOUT); $| = 1; # make unbuffered - optional
rmtree("/tmp/foo", 1, 0);
close(STDOUT);
open(STDOUT, ">&OLDOUT");
my $text = '';
if (open(IN, "<$tmpfile")){
    local $/;
    $text = <IN>;
    close(IN);
}
else {
    die " '$tmpfile' ($!)";
}
$text =~ tr|\n| |;
print "[$text]\n";

--fish
Strolling Prime Minister of no fixed address