You can open an output file which is a pipe to 'program', then 'print' the output of your funciton to that pipe, as in: 
open PROG, "|program" or die "Can't open output pipe to 'program'";
print PROG function();
close PROG;

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It's concise, and comes pretty close to the the goal of the code itself describing what's going on.

Update: Oops! It's also not what you were asking for. (Sorry, I didn't read carefully, and didn't see the backticks in your code in my browser's font. )

IPC::Open2, as Tanktalus suggests is the most concise approach under Unix. I haven't had success with IPC::Open2 under MSWindows, either XP or 98 (Perl v5.8.6 and v5.8.4 respectively). On MSWindows I think you're stuck writing to a temporary file, as in : 

my $input = "first line\nsecond line";
open TEMP, '>' "temp$$";
print TEMP $input;
close TEMP;
my $ouput = `type temp$$|\\vim\\vim63\\xxd.exe`;
print $output;
unlink "temp$$";
# (tested)

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If you're sure you won't have newlines or other troublesome characers in the '$input' data, then what you started with, using 'echo', is about as good as you'll get. (Now watch, as a much cleverer monk proves me wrong.)

In reply to Re: piping a function into a backtick shell by rodion
in thread piping a function into a backtick shell by drawde83

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