the path in the backticks was not a relative path and would be entirely unaffected by the $ENV{PATH} variable

That's not the (whole) issue. The code you are executing within the backticks could do anything including spawning subshells which could execute code in the tainted PATH. Much more secure to specify the PATH either by hard-coding as here or with careful untainting. Just because your command statement at the top level doesn't utilise $PATH it doesn't mean that some part of it won't when running.

🦛

In reply to Re^3: Proper and acceptable use of backticks in a modern Perl script by hippo
in thread Proper and acceptable use of backticks in a modern Perl script by Polyglot

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