If the 2>&1 trick works, then he is going through the shell.

Actually, if the only "shell meta characters" in your command are a trailing "2>&1", then Perl will still avoid using the shell and simply redirect STDERR to STDOUT after it forks but before it execs.

I think this feature was added to Perl fairly recently and I have yet to notice it having been documented.

                - tye

In reply to Re^3: Inconsistent system call from backticks vs system() (little-known) by tye
in thread Inconsistent system call from backticks vs system() by Tanalis

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