I agree that merlyn's article is well-written and is easy to understand. However that article doesn't seem (at least to a low-flying monk) to address the OP's question, which is about the passing of environmental variables by  system and by backticks. I therefore support Errto's request for code from the OP, as I would like to learn about this.

In reply to Re^2: system vs backticks by dbae
in thread system vs backticks by Anonymous Monk

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