backticks may be easy and perform the same as 'open' on Windows, but backticks perform worse on *nix for some reason. The following code: 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::HiRes qw(time);
use POSIX qw(strftime);

timestamp();
my $fred = `echo plenty of fish`;
timestamp();
warn $fred;
timestamp();
open my $fh, 'echo ' . $fred . ' |';
$fred = <$fh>;
close $fh;
timestamp();
warn $fred;
timestamp();

sub timestamp {
    my $t = time;
    my $date = strftime "%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S", localtime $t;
    $date .= sprintf ".%03d", ($t-int($t))*1000; 
    print $date, "\n";
}

[download]
produced the following results on three platforms:

Windows: backtick: 12ms open: 11ms

SunOS: backtick: 17ms open: 8ms

Debian: backtick: 1ms open: 0ms

It doesn't look too significant with the trivial subprocess above, but if the subprocess is heavier the difference increases disproportionately on Debian - enough to change site standards.

One world, one people

In reply to Re^2: How to capture compile errors from child program? by anonymized user 468275
in thread How to capture compile errors from child program? by bulrush

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