> Is there any difference between the backticks and the process open which you have just demonstrated?
A quick glance over the perlipc manpage reveals they that are similar in intent. They both fork and execute the process, but open() ...

... gives you finer control of the whole process, letting you to kill off the child process early if you'd like.

So you might use open() if you want to exit from the process early in order to avoid unnecessary overhead.
HTH

broquaint