Marius van Witzenburg "Learned my lesson in life, now setting my action to stay in life."

How to use the exec() and system() function and capture the returned output.

When you want to execute a program you sometimes want to use the result of the program you executed.

exec(PROGRAM);
$result = system(PROGRAM);

Both Perl's exec() function and system() function execute a system shell command. The big difference is that system() creates a fork process and waits to see if the command succeeds or fails - returning a value. exec() does not return anything, it simply executes the command. Neither of these commands should be used to capture the output of a system call. If your goal is to capture output, you should use the backtick operator:

$result = `PROGRAM`;

Found this information in a post by Kirk Brown.