Perl script to get Python's version

Question

Is there an easy way to get the version of Python from a Perl script? For example, get the equivalent of the version python -V. I need this to determine if I need to run python26 or just python on some of my linux boxes.

If there isn't an easy way, I plan to run the python -V then capture stdout and parse it.

Answer 1

You can execute any system command and capture STDOUT with qx:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $v = qx(python -V);
print $v;