My Perl Script runs a system command, I want the output as a string for the rest of the script, how can this be accomplished?

Question

For example if my script was the following:

#! /bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

system('echo schwifty')

-how could I get the output on my terminal (schwifty) into a string that I could continue on with my script using?

NOTE: "echo" is just given as an example I'm using other commands that print to the screen.

Answer 1

To capture output of an external command, use backticks or qx:

my $output = qx{echo schwifty};
die unless $output =~ /schw/;

Answer 2

For multi-line system calls such as ls I tend to use an @array to store the output. More flexible than a variable when there are lots of lines to process.

Very similar to choroba's example but expanded a little further.

my @output = qx{ ls -l };

foreach my $line ( @output )
{
    # process each $line here
    print "$line";
}