in reply to A simple backticks question

The for loop iterates a (potentially huge) list returned by the backticks.

If you want to avoid creating that list, you can use open thusly:

open CMD, '-|', 'ls -l' or die $!;
while( my $fname = <CMD> ) {
   chomp $fname;
   #process the file names one at a time
}
close CMD;

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