Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Name

exec

Synopsis

exec command
                  

Terminates the currently running Perl script and executes the program named in command. The Perl program does not resume after the exec unless the exec cannot be run and produces an error. Unlike system, the executed command is not forked off into a child process. An exec completely replaces the script in its current process.

command may be a scalar containing a string with the name of the program to run and any arguments. This string is checked for shell metacharacters, and if there are any, passes the string to /bin/sh/ -c for parsing. Otherwise, the string is read as a program command, bypassing any shell processing. The first word of the string is used as the program name, with any remaining words used as arguments.

command may also be a list value in which the first element is parsed as the program name and remaining elements as arguments. For example:

exec 'echo', 'Your arguments are: ', @ARGV;

The exec function is not implemented for Perl on Win32 platforms.