Results from a system call

[rjulich]

Is it possible to put the results from a system call into a variable? I tried:

$variable = system("fgrep date $file");
print "VARIABLE: $variable\n";

The results from the system call print to STDOUT, but when I print $variable, it prints:

VARIABLE: 0

I assume that the system call it returning 0 to mean that the command was successful, but is there a way to put the results from that system call into a variable?

Thank you in advance.
Ray

[mistwang]

I am not a perl programmer, probably cannot give your the correct answer. You should refer to a Perl programming book.
In shell script I can use:

variable=`fgrep date $file`

to get result from the shell command, not sure about Perl though.

[rjulich]

That worked. Thank you very much for the help. It's important to remember to use ` instead of '.