Aside from the other posts in this thread, I'd also like to point out that:
system("sstty +rs 1a12","/");
is very unlikely to work, unless you have a command called
"sstty +rs 1a12", and you want to pass it the single argument of "/".
When you invoke the multi-arg system or exec or pipe-open, you assume complete responsibility for argument parsing, since no shell
will decide that for you. The first argument will be precisely
the command name (as found in the $ENV{PATH}, of course),
and the remaining args are passed one-by-one (although a NUL character cannot be passed because of the underlying interfaces).
Perhaps what you wanted was:
system("sstty","+rs","1a12","/")
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