Capturing STDOUT, STDIN and Return Code from external command 2

[JJ1]

Folks,

I'm fairly new to Perl and UNIX, but have been placed with the UNIX team at work for a month.

My first task is to create a script which mounts NFS shares and raises an alert upon failure (we have a system called 'Remedy' which displays incident alerts to a 24-7 team).

To generate a Remedy alert, we have a UNIX binary, which returns zero on success and another number on failure. It also outputs to STDOUT or STDERR on failure (at least that's now I understand it, but am unsure how to test this).

What I really need is to capture the command's return code, but also keep a record of the STDOUT/STDERR (for logging purposes).

system() gives me the return code, but no STDOUT/STDERR whilst backticks (` `) do the opposite.

The command I'm running is:
[red]
system( "/bin/su", "-c", "/home/remedy/Remedy_gentkt -s \"$fault_title\" -L \"$description\"", "non_root_user" );
[/red]
I'm sure there must be a way. Any suggestions would be greatfully received ;-)

 

[andyros]

The only thing i can think of is you could direct STDOUT&STDERR to a file which is done like this at your system call:

2>&1 1>somefile.txt

system( "/bin/su", "-c", "/home/remedy/Remedy_gentkt -s \"$fault_title\" -L \"$description\"", "non_root_user" 2>&1 1>somefile.txt);

I THINK, I also suck at unix so you might want to google 'outputing STDOUT' or something like that !

andy

 

[andyros]

2 represents STDERR and 1 represents STDOUT by the way, so were are making STDERR go to STDOUT and then wacking that into the file

 

[tchatzi]

system(my_huge_unix_command | tee output.out);

This will print the STDOUT/STDERR on the screen (if there is any) and at the same time will print them inside the file output.out


``The wise man doesn't give the right answers,
he poses the right questions.''
TIMTOWTDI

 

[JJ1]

Andyros,

That's a great suggestion. Based on your answer, I think this is what I need:

[Red]
system( "/bin/su", "-c", "/home/remedy/Remedy_gentkt -s \"$fault_title\" -L \"$description\"", "non_root_user" 1>/tmp/stdout 2>/tmp/stderr );
[/Red]

It's slightly messy because I then have to open the file (using open() ?) and delete it when finished.

I'll go with this unless someone can think of anything better.

Thanks,

James.

 

[duncdude]

Nice answer andyros!!!

Have a star!


Kind Regards
Duncan