2teez++. Using symlink avoids messing with the unknown system default shell:

Passing unquoted variables to a single-string system really begs for trouble, as soon as variables contain meta characters. Quoting rules differ with the shell used (and become a real nightmare on Windows), and there is no safe way to find which rules work as intended.

Using symlink also avoids the overhead of creating a new, complex process for just a single kernel call, and gives a clear error code in $! instead of returning some obscure exit code and some random text on STDERR of the child process.

Alexander