In addition to using the aforementioned backtick solutions, you may also want to look into IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3, as they are much easier to use when the taint flag is on.

It's usualy much easier (and safer) to just do:

  my $pid = open2($reader,$writer,'ping',@args);
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Instead of trying to un-taint the arguments to backticks.

Kyle