Note that a shell could still get invoked if @_ == 1 and the first element contains shell metacharacters.

Good point. And rather unfortunate. Many commands accept '--' as an argument to signify the end of the command line switches. You could pass that if you're executing such a program.

backticks('ls foo');        # Run "ls" with argument "foo"
backticks('ls foo', '--');  # Run "ls foo" with argument "--"
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