Re: Safely capturing the output of an external program

the arguments that need to be passed come from user-supplied data, and while the program being called itself should be safe to invoke, there's the issue of the shell and its shenanigans ... system and exec have "safe" invocations ... Does qx//?

No, not in the core*. I wrote about exactly this issue here: In this case, I might recommend IPC::System::Simple's capturex as a safer drop-in replacement for qx//, or IPC::Run3 if you want to capture STDERR as well.

* Update: Ok, well, not quite right, there are piped opens with more than one argument, but those require one to be careful to get right, and didn't work on Windows for quite some time. The modules just make this much easier.

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Re^2: Safely capturing the output of an external program by AppleFritter (Vicar) on Mar 09, 2020 at 08:06 UTC
Not being in the core is fine. And this, from `IPC::System::Simple`'s documentation, Better still, you can even use capturex() to run the equivalent of backticks, but without the shell: is exactly what I wanted to read. Thanks!	[reply]
Re^3: Safely capturing the output of an external program by perlancar (Hermit) on Mar 10, 2020 at 06:14 UTC
I'd like to offer another alternative, my IPC::System::Options which exports readpipe() and lets you use the standard backtick operator but with the option of not having to use shell.	[reply]