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NAME

perlfaq8 - System Interaction ($Revision: 1.8 $, $Date: 2002/05/16 12:41:42 $)

DESCRIPTION

This section of the Perl FAQ covers questions involving operating system interaction. Topics include interprocess communication (IPC), control over the user-interface (keyboard, screen and pointing devices), and most anything else not related to data manipulation.

• How do I find out which operating system I'm running under?
• How come exec() doesn't return?
• How do I do fancy stuff with the keyboard/screen/mouse?
• How do I print something out in color?
• How do I read just one key without waiting for a return key?
• How do I check whether input is ready on the keyboard?
• How do I clear the screen?
• How do I get the screen size?
• How do I ask the user for a password?
• How do I read and write the serial port?
• open mode
• end of line
• flushing output
• non-blocking input
• How do I decode encrypted password files?
• How do I start a process in the background?
• STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are shared
• How do I trap control characters/signals?
• How do I modify the shadow password file on a Unix system?
• How do I set the time and date?
• How can I sleep() or alarm() for under a second?
• How can I measure time under a second?
• How can I do an atexit() or setjmp()/longjmp()? (Exception handling)
• Why doesn't my sockets program work under System V (Solaris)? What does the error message "Protocol not supported" mean?
• How can I call my system's unique C functions from Perl?
• Where do I get the include files to do ioctl() or syscall()?
• Why do setuid perl scripts complain about kernel problems?
• How can I open a pipe both to and from a command?
• Why can't I get the output of a command with system()?
• How can I capture STDERR from an external command?
• Why doesn't open() return an error when a pipe open fails?
• What's wrong with using backticks in a void context?
• How can I call backticks without shell processing?
• Why can't my script read from STDIN after I gave it EOF (^D on Unix, ^Z on MS-DOS)?
• How can I convert my shell script to perl?
• Can I use perl to run a telnet or ftp session?
• How can I write expect in Perl?
• Is there a way to hide perl's command line from programs such as "ps"?
• I {changed directory, modified my environment} in a perl script. How come the change disappeared when I exited the script? How do I get my changes to be visible?
• How do I close a process's filehandle without waiting for it to complete?
• How do I fork a daemon process?
• How do I find out if I'm running interactively or not?
• How do I timeout a slow event?
• How do I set CPU limits?
• How do I avoid zombies on a Unix system?
• How do I use an SQL database?
• How do I make a system() exit on control-C?
• How do I open a file without blocking?
• How do I install a module from CPAN?
• What's the difference between require and use?
• How do I keep my own module/library directory?
• How do I add the directory my program lives in to the module/library search path?
• How do I add a directory to my include path at runtime?
• What is socket.ph and where do I get it?

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