How can I call winrar in perl on windows

Question

Is it possible to call winrar through perl on a windows system, such as

perl -e "rar a -rr10 -s c:\backups\backup.rar @backup.lst"

If so, is there a more efficient way to do this?

I've looked up "perl -e" +winrar on google, however none of the results gave me any answer that was remotely close to what i was looking for. The system Im running this on is a Windows XP system. Im open to doing this in another language like python if its easier, however I am more comfertable with perl.

Answer 1

One way to execute external commands from a Perl script is to use system:

my $cmd = 'rar a -rr10 -s c:\backups\backup.rar @backup.lst';
if (system $cmd) {
    print "Error: $? for command $cmd"
}

Answer 2

You can access the RAR facilities in Windows using the CPAN module Archive::Rar:

use Archive::Rar;
my $rar = Archive::Rar->new(-archive => $archive_filename);
$rar->Extract();

Answer 3

To use external applications from your Perl program, use the system builtin.

If you need the output from the command, you can use the backtick (``) or qx operator as discussed in perlop. You can also use pipes as discussed in perlipc.