Programming

Hello,

Fairly simple really I have an xml file and I want to check to see if it contains a pattern. The pattern is "../"

On the command line I can type: grep "\.\./" myFile.xml
and I get desired result.

To do the same thing in a perl script I thought it was as simple as putting the `` around the command but it won't work no matter what I do.

Code:

$check = `grep "\.\./" $myFile`;

I've tried different variations of the command such as escaping the / but still no joy. No matter what it seems to be returning every line from the file that contains a . OR a /

Anyone have any insight into this?

Perl has a built-in grep function.

i.e.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use diagnostics;

my $file = "/tmp/file";

open(FILE, "<$file") or die "Unable to open: $file\n";
while(<FILE>) 
    {if(grep(/\.\.\//, $_)) {
        print;
    }
}
close(FILE);
exit(0);

grep - perldoc.perl.org

Hope this helps.

@in2nix4life

Delicious thanks very much. I knew about perl's grep function but never perceived $_ as a list! duh...

Use pattern match m// instead of grep.

Code:

while (<FILE>) {
    if (m/\.\.\//) { print }
}

Any particular reason or is it just better programming?