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perlbashstdoutout

Correct stream for interactive in perl

My perl script needs to ask the user for a password to download some files:

print "Your password please: \n";
ReadMode('noecho');
$password = ReadLine(0);
$password =~ s/\n//;
ReadMode(0);

system("wget --user=user --password=\"$password\" http://some.server/data.xml");
do_something();

If I call the script with $> ./script.pl everything works fine. But if I want to pipe the output to a file with $> ./script.pl > text.txt, the password question is piped to the file, too, and the ReadLine does not work any longer.

What is the right way to do this?

Solution

  • Print the prompt to STDERR:

    print STDERR "Your password please: ";