perl, system function and run external command

Question

I am trying launch adduser command from perl.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
"-c 'Fred'",
'-d /vol2/home/DMZ/f.kals',
'-g 3335','-u 11002',
"-k '/dev/null'",
'-m',
'-p "$1$kKNKMa8O$g03oj6YeeZbO2i3NMSoyT1"',
'fred');
system (@test);

When I executed the above, I got the following output:

[ay@pandora /vol2]$ sudo ./test.pl
useradd: invalid home directory ' /vol2/home/DMZ/fred'

Why?

If I do not use array

my $command="/foor/bar/useradd -m -g 1234 -u 6789 -param2 -param3 username"
system ($command);

that works OK.. why not array?

J-16 SDiZ · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-23 04:33:17Z

6

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
"-c 'Fred'",

-c and Fred are different arguments, so are -d and /vol2/home/DMZ/fred ...
When you use array form, you don't have to escape/quote. (this is why array form is safer -- you don't have to handle the shell escapes!)

So, it should be:

my @test=('/usr/sbin/useradd',
'-c', 'Fred',
'-d', '/vol2/home/DMZ/f.kals',
'-g', '3335',
'-u', '11002',
'-k', '/dev/null',
'-m',
'-p', '$1$kKNKMa8O$g03oj6YeeZbO2i3NMSoyT1',
'fred');

answered Dec 23, 2011 at 4:33

J-16 SDiZ

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1 Comment

TLP Over a year ago

@AntonShevtsov If this answered your question, you should click the checkmark to the left to mark it as "accepted".

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