I've recently upgrading my perl version from 628 to 631 and now the backticks are not returning the output from their system calls. The following example used to work on 628 but no longer works after the 631 upgrade. I'd rewrite the function (not mine in the first place) but it doesn't solve the problem that backticks still don't work and we use them other places in the code. Any help would be appreciated. 
print "Ourname = $ourname"; 
($ourshortname = $0) =~ s!/!\\!g;
$ourshortname = `dir /b $ourname`;
$ourshortname =~ s/[^\.\w-]//g;
$ourname =~ m!(.*)\\([^\\]*)$!; 
$ourname = "cgi-bin/$ourshortname";

print "ourname is now $ourname<BR>";

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Added code tags - dvergin 2002-03-27

In reply to backtick problems with perl 5.6.1.631 by ruffing

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