If you want to completely avoid invoking a shell, try using IPC::Open2 (or IPC::Open3 if you also need stderr.) Using backticks will spawn a shell (there really should be a multi-argument form of backticks.)

Update: Here is a code fragment to do this:

use IPC::Open2;
use File::Temp;
my ($fh, $path) = tempfile();
unlink($path);   # automatically releases storage on exit
my $pid = open2($fh, \*STDIN, ’some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');
waitpid $pid, 0; # wait for child to exit

# now you can read the child's output from $fh
[download]