I have to disagree with that as a default recommendation for the OPs stated requirement.

If you need the complexity of those--Ie. You need to be able to intereact with the background process's input and output streams--that is a fine recommendation, but for simply running a processes in the background?

Neither is exactly the easiest of modules to use, and the documentation of both leaves a lot to be desired.

That one reverses the order of the first two parameters relative to the other is confusing enough. I can never remember, or work out from the descriptions whether *RDRFH is a handle for reading, from the perspective of the perl script, or that of the command being run? I end up trying it to find out.

That the descriptions are entirely geared to their use in a *nix environment, with most of the description being deferred to man page references and useage with *nix utilities, mean I would avoid recommending the use of either to a win32 user, without there being a definite need to do so.