I need to execute the same perl script, multiple times, on different files.
To ease the process, I am trying to save the perl script as a bash string,
and call perl over the string, as in the "doesn't work" part of the code below:
#!/bin/sh
# works
perl -e 'print 1;'
# doesn't work
S="'print 1;'"
perl -e $S
perl -e $S
I get the following output:
1Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.
What am I doing wrong here? Can I achieve the same effect in some other way?
You simply have too many quotes in your string $S
:
#!/bin/sh
# works
perl -e 'print 1;'
# also works
S='print 1;'
perl -e "$S"
I have also added some double quotes around "$S"
, which prevents problems with word splitting.
Another option is to use the -x
switch to Perl:
#!/bin/sh
perl -x "$0"
echo <<EOF >/dev/null
#!/usr/bin/env perl
my $a=5;
print "$a\n";
__END__
EOF
echo 'something else'
$0
is the name of the current script, so Perl looks for the first line starting with #!
and containing perl
and interprets everything up to __END__
as a Perl script. The echo >/dev/null
prevents the Perl script from being interpreted by the shell.