You will find this perlfaq item of interest: How can I call backticks without shell processing?

Update:I should add that if you bypass the shell with exec (as salva and the FAQ above suggest), then there is less concern about malicious arguments such as ";rm -rf * *.*", which is what my other reply was addressing, but I don't know enough about dict to be able to categorically say any argument passed to it this way would be safe. FWIW, my guess is that it would be, since I just can't imagine a DoS attack, for example, based on some special argument to dict.

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: Safely passing CGI form data to a shell command by tlm
in thread Safely passing CGI form data to a shell command by Tommy

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