Valid point Fletch.

I wrote it the way I did because I was thinking of a short-term debugging effort, where the OP would erase the line after seeing what it expanded to. When passing shorter length system calls (and this applies to other functions as well), I prefer to have the command written inside the call, rather than forcing my brain to stop reading along with the flow of the program and backtrack to the $command variable definition.

Regardless, not knowing how the OP would be using our advice though, I should not have posted like this.