To expand a bit on japhy's response, you will be best served by using a piping form of open, with the parameters in list form. Using list form will prevent any shell expansion on the parameters, which avoids many problems. Here's a very simple example:

    open my $lsfh, "-|", "ls", "-l"
         or die "Cannot open pipe from 'ls': $!";

    while (<$lsfh>) {
      print;
    }

    close $lsfh;
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