Need help with system call

[dneid]

Hey, Guys,
I am writing a simple daily logger script and I want to get the system date to use as a tag in the file. I know this can be done, but I am doing something wrong (I am an occasional perl programmer).

So, what I want is execute the system date function (UNIX date) and get the returned data shoved into a variable. Something like:

$sillyVarName = system(date);

When I try this though the variable is empty. Can some one tell me what I am doing wrong. BTW I tried system('date')... all to no avail.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Dale

 

[bluedragon2]

$time = `date`;

[Blue]Blue[/Blue] [Dragon]

If I wasn't Blue, I would just be a Dragon...

 

[KevinADC]

you may need to use the full path to the date command as well:

$time = `/bin/date`;

but there is really no need to shell out to the system date, use perl instead. Use POSIX to format the dte if necessary:

use POSIX qw/strftime/;

http://perldoc.perl.org/POSIX.html

------------------------------------------
- Kevin, perl coder unexceptional!

 

[fishiface]

Its unnecessarily expensive to fork a new process when you could get the same result from

my $time = scalar localtime();

[tt]localtime()[/tt] returns a properly formatted date string if called in scalar context and an array of date/time values

my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime();

if called in an array context.



["]As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.["]
--Maur