Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 09:34:39 +0000
From: gnari <gnarinn@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Some perl questions
Message-Id: <994757679.795332099311054.gnarinn@hotmail.com>

In article <bLq27.392823$K5.41256436@news1.rdc1.nj.home.com>,
Kevin Joseph <kejoseph@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I have the following Perl related questions. Any assistance would be highly
>appreciated.
>
>1.  What does the following do ? Does it return the error level ?
>
>$rc = 0xffff & system ( "some command" ) ;
>
>2.  What does the following do ? Is it for initializing ?
>
>$abc = shift ;
>

There comes with you perl a wonderful set of documentation. You would
be advised to learn to use it. There should be the command perldoc
installed. to get info on a particular builtin function, like 'shift', do:

perldoc -f shift

Also, you should try:

perldoc perldoc
perldoc perl
perldoc perlfunc



>3. I have written a couple of cgi scripts which run some system commands.
>Say
>
>print "Content type : text/html" ;
>..
>...
>$abc = `ptree 128` ;
>for $i ( 0 .. $#abc ) {
>    print "$abc[$i]<BR> " ;
>  }
>....
>...
>The problem with this script is that it does not print the spaces which
>appear ( if at all ) before $abc[$i]
>So instead of outputing
>  10 some proces
>         100  some sub process
>                 100 some child process
>
>it prints
>
>10 some proces
>100  some sub process
>100 some child process
>

no actually it prints:

  10 some process<BR>          100  some sub
process<BR>                  100 some child process<BR> 

How this is displayed by your browser is another matter.

>How do I fix this ?
>

learn HTML (and dont ask about that in this newsgroup!)

gnari