Actually, Perl's system and exec only invoke a shell if you pass them a single string and that string contains shell meta characters.

Note that this can still break things similar to the original story:

my $root= "/usr/local ";   # oops
system( "rm -rf $root/lib" );    # goodbye /lib (and /usr/local)

# However, if you instead do:
system( "rm", "-rf", "$root/lib" );
# then nothing gets deleted unless
# "/usr/local /lib" exists.
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Note that no shell is involved in the above problem.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")