That is certainly ugly, but sadly it's the option I prefer nowadays. In perl I use 3 argument open with a pipe instead of backticks. Especially if any of your a

That is certainly ugly, but sadly it's the option I prefer nowadays. In perl I use 3 argument open with a pipe instead of backticks. Especially if any of your args come from a variable--suddenly you have to think of shell quoting in your perl code. Yuck. Perl desperately needs a built-in backtick() function: my $x = backtick(qw(my-program -l -V), "--option=$something", @files); Maybe in perl you'd call it ``() or something instead of backtick().