8.130 Shell

Allows you to invoke Unix shell utilities as if they were Perl subroutines. Arguments (including switches) are passed to the utilities as strings:

use Shell qw(date cp ps);  # list shell commands you want to use

$date = date();   # put the output of the date(1) command into $date
cp("-p" "/etc/passwd", "/tmp/passwd");  # copy password file to a tmp file
print ps("-ww");  # print the results of a "ps -ww" command