A good substitute for backticks is the capturex function from IPC::System::Simple. It's like backticks in list context, and it will not invoke the shell. If you want the shell, then use the capture function. For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
use IPC::System::Simple qw/capturex/;

my @args = "%s I\x27ll";
my $cmd = capturex("printf", @args);
print $cmd;
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I really hope this helps you.