I'm trying to execute commands on a remote host from a perl script.
$check = `rsh host1 "df -k /backup/|tail -1|awk \'{print \$5}\'"`;
print $check
But awk returns me the whole string instead of one column.
/dev/md/dsk/d10 4133838 1936684 2155816 48% /
I need only
48%
Looks like there is an issue in escaping but don't know what exactly wrong. Please help.
One option would be to use qx with the single quote as a delimiter instead, so that Perl variables are not interpolated:
$check = qx'rsh host1 "df -k /backup/|tail -1|awk \"{print \$5}\""';
I have used double quotes around the awk command, so it is still necessary to escape the $5 to prevent it from being interpreted as a shell variable.
If you are happy to run tail and awk on the local machine, you can remove the double quotes:
$check = qx'rsh host1 df -k /backup/|tail -1|awk "{print \$5}"';
This results in more data being copied back from the remote machine, which may or may not be a problem.
Alternatively, you could split the output using Perl and avoid the problem entirely:
$check = (split /\s+/, qx'rsh host1 "df -k /backup/|tail -1"')[4];