Running a batch file from Perl (Activestate perl in Windows)

Question

I have a Perl program which does something like below:

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

my $exe = "C:\\project\\set_env_and_run.bat";

my $arg1 = "\\\\Server\\share\\folder1";    
my $arg2 = "D:\\output\\folder1";

my $cmd = "$exe \"$arg1\" \"$arg2\"";    
my $status = system("$cmd > c:\\tmp\\out.txt 2>&1");

print "$status\n";

I am calling this Perl code in an eval block. When invoked, i get the status printed as 0, but the batch file has not actually executed. What would be the reason for this? Any issue with the 'system' call coded above?

Thanks, Jits

Answer 1

You need to escape your backslashes inside of double quotes.

my $exe = "C:\\project\\set_env_and_run.bat";
...
my $status = system("$cmd > c:\\tmp\\out.txt 2>&1");