Hi Guntherssl,

Sure, Perl is a glue language and there's nothing inherently wrong with shelling out to other programs. There are just several things one has to watch out for, and people get these things wrong quite often. For example: knowing how to avoid issues with quoting command line arguments (such as knowing how to avoid the shell altogether), this includes potential security issues caused by interpolating Perl variables into the shell commands; correctly communicating with the subprocess including feeding it STDIN, capturing its STDOUT, and evaluating its exit code for success or failure; forgetting that the subprocess might write things to STDERR that might be relevant to capture; trying to use things like backticks/system when it's not appropriate and one should use modules instead; and lastly that many things are simply much more efficient with Perl builtins (a few examples of very many: `ls ...` vs. glob, or shelling out to sed or awk). So if you keep all that in mind, feel free to try out IPC::Run :-)

Regards,
-- Hauke D

Update: Reduced wordiness slightly.