I mean a user could as easily pass in some malicious code in $cmd using open($FH,"$cmd|") as in using `$cmd` or am I missing something?

The difference is that the pipe open supports a list form, so in open my $handle, "$cmd|", $arg1, $arg2 the $arg1 and $arg2 don't evaluate shell meta characters; if they are user-supplied, they generally can't execute arbitrary code.

Whereas if you do `$cmd $arg1 $arg2`, and one of the arguments is user-supplied, having $arg1 = '; rm -rf ~/*' might cause much more damage.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re^3: Best way to call external os command by moritz
in thread Best way to call external os command by ennuikiller

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