How to use shell command result in perl script?

Question

Can anyone show me, how to use shell command result in Perl script ?

#!/usr/bin/perl
$whoami=`whoami`;
system ('cd /var/home/'.$whoami.'/htdocs');
print $whoami;

Script output

[user1@srv _1]$ ./sys.pl
sh: line 1: /htdocs: No such file or directory
user1

I want to change dir to /var/home/user1/htdocs

Answer 1

$whoami contains the endline character \n, which causes your command string to look like:

cd /var/home/user1
/htdocs

You should use chomp to delete the trailing newline from $whoami:

my $whoami = `whoami`;
chomp $whoami;

Answer 2

This can be accomplished w/o shelling out:

#!perl
my $dir = '/home/'.getlogin().'/htdocs';
chdir $dir;