Well, since Perl doesn't always run on Unix, and that having this dislike is a sign that this activity is likely more than just based on a purely aesthetic concern for the programmer (I guess that they want something that is capable of working interoperably on both win32 and Unixish perl, perhaps others);

I'd suspect that this is a better method to choose to maximize robustness, but if it's just going to run on something with accessible unix shells... I'd only do this to save forking costs, in that case...

Pramatism vs. Elegance!