Hi,

in some legacy code (running on Windows) we came across this to capture the output of an external command: 

sub fetch_cmd {
    my ($cmd) = @_;
    my $ret;

    unless ( open FH, $cmd . ' 2>&1 |' ) {
        return;
    }
    while (<FH>) {
        $ret .= $_;
    }
    close FH;
    return $ret;
}

[download]
We are currently having some discussions on whether the above construct involves a shell (I think it does) and whether it is better then simply using backticks (I think it is not).

What is your opinion?

In reply to capturing command output by morgon

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