I agree that people often don't treat the exit code the way they should when using the backticks. However there's better options in the ruby stdlib too, like `s

I agree that people often don't treat the exit code the way they should when using the backticks. However there's better options in the ruby stdlib too, like `system` and `spawn` and `popen`. Using the other methods allows you to also sidestep the shell if you know the arguments you want to pass.