Tuesday 29 September 2009

system($cmd) vs qx/$cmd/ in tests

I have just found an interesting thing in my test suite.

The other day, I had some silent failures since I was capturing the output, but not checking the error code, of some commands.

my $output = `/some/command/which/normally/works -params`;

Since the output was unimportant, but the command working was, I thought I'd switch as follows

my $rc = system(q{/some/command/which/normally/works -params});
if ($rc != 0) {
croak q{Meaningfull message};
}

All seems fine, until I run the test suite.
t/20-mytests.t ..
1..9
ok 1
ok 2
ok 3
ok 4
ok 5
ok 6
ok 7
ok 8
00000000ok 9
Failed 1/9 subtests

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/20-mytests.t (Wstat: 0 Tests: 8 Failed: 0)
Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 9 tests but ran 8.

So what is wrong here.

I don't know the ins and outs, but after a bit of debugging, it is that the system command under the test framework causes the TAP not to count the test, regardless of it passing or not.

Solution to this:

Go back to

my $output = `/some/command/which/normally/works -params`;
if ($CHILD_ERROR != 0) {
croak q{Meaningfull message};
}


Everything is now fine again.

1 comment:

zloyrusskiy said...

From perldoc for system:

The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the wait call. To get the actual exit value, shift right by eight (see below). See also "exec". This is not what you want to use to capture the output from a command, for that you should use merely backticks or qx//, as described in "`STRING`" in perlop. Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program or an error of the wait(2) system call (inspect $! for the reason).