I am running a cgi program on apache which runs an executable and assigns a variable to the output like this (in perl): my $results = system "/usr/bin/exe $arg"; my problem is that this executable also tries to PRINT the results to STDOUT - this causes me problems because it either messes up my cgi headers or it messes up my HTML (depending on whether I print headers before or after I call the executable) I have tried redirecting output to a file and that doesn't work either ex $results = system "/usr/local/exe $arg >> /tmp/file"; help :-)

ordinarily you would just do something like this: a = system("ls * 2&1 > /dev/null"); if (a != 0) { printf "%s", "Bogus run::program failed"; } else { EXIT_SUCCESS; } YMMV, I tried it with awk and in C, and got different results depending on how I passed the command to execve. As ARGV[1] in awk it was almost impossible. In C it was trivial, so... BTW, I hate perl it's a write only language.

thanks for the help - i did try redirection to /dev/null and it still wanted to print -> the kludge i ended up with was embedding the return garbage in a META tag - it still prints but now, no one has to look at it! :-)