system results in a lot of unwanted ugliness to the screen.

There are ways to work around that. Many commands support a --quiet switch, which is my preferred method because I usually want to see external command's output to be able to inspect it for problems, or you could use another module to capture the command's STDOUT to suppress it.

system returns a response code which I'm just going to throw away.

I don't understand this argument - you're throwing away the backtick's return value as well... Plus, why would you call a command and then ignore whether it was successful or not?

backticks are faster to type and less cluttering.

Backticks don't offer a way to avoid the shell.

In reply to Re^3: Running command with backslash not working as expected by haukex
in thread Running command with backslash not working as expected by nysus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.