Retrieving Version numbers.

Hey all, New to the list. The only reason I joined was because searching the = archive is a joke. Try to search for something using more than one word = and you get it all. hehe. Anyway, I tryed a search and didn't find anything on this so here goes. I need to retrieve the version number from differant programs. example: = "perl -v", or "sendmail -bt -d0", etc.. The problem is that (for example perl) the program returns a bunch of BS = that isn't needed. Does anyone know of a way to access this info = easily? Maybe capture the return in a string and then parse to the = numbers? Not sure how I should do this. Any info would be helpful. = Thanks. Chuck