Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Everyone,

There is a perl file: a.pl
============
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $config_file = $ARGV[0];
open CONFIG, "$config_file" or die "Program stopping, couldn't open the configuration file '$config_file'.\n";
my $config = join "", <CONFIG>;
close CONFIG;
eval $config;
die "Couldn't interpret the configuration file ($config_file) that was given.\nError details follow: $@\n" if $@;
print $home_dir;
==============

the conf file: a.conf
=================
#-------------------------#
$home_dir = `cat /etc/passwd | grep root | cut -f6 -d':' | tr -d '\n'`;

So i run: a.pl a.conf, so i can easy get the output "/root".

From this a.pl. there is no way to write to the a.pl, like change the value of $home_dir?

Please advice. Thanks

I think i wil drop this method to read and write conf file, becuase if i use
use strict;
use warnings;
in the a.pl,
then fail.

Is there a specific reason why you want to obtain the home directory from a configuration file, rather than just obtaining it directly from /etc/passwd or getpwent()? It seems like a lot of extra hoops to jump through to obtain a shell command string from a config file and then have to execute that command just to gather information that could be done directly within perl.

- B