Perl: how can I capture output in a variable in the same time showing it in standard output?

Question

I started working on a perl script and I'm calling external rsync application to do a backup. I want to capture the output of the rsync action and I'm using this format:

print "Starting backup. Please wait...\n";
my @output = `rsync -avut /home /media/drive/`;

At this point, the script is running as is supposed to, but the action of the rsync is captured into my array and I can't see the progress. Is there a way to capture the output as above, but also show it in my console?

Answer 1

The backticks capture STDOUT and places it in your array.

If you want to see STDOUT as well as capture it in a variable, you could use open().

I think something like this might work?

my $output;
print "Starting backup. Please wait...\n";
open(RSYNC, "-|", "rsync -avut /home /media/drive") 
    or die "Can't exec rsync : $!";
while(<RSYNC>)
{
  print $_;
  $output .= $_;
}
close(RSYNC);

Answer 2

something like this might do the trick

use strict;

my $fh;

open $fh, "find /|"; #don't forget to check it opens!!

while (<$fh>){
   chomp;
   print "here--$_\n";
}

Answer 3

You can take a look at this related question. The accepted answer suggests using Capture::Tiny.