"It may be that the command is checking slowed down / confused by the capturing of it's STDOUT. it might be looking for a tty or something similar."
I guess that's the best idea I've heard so far for why it might behave like that. Anyone here know if restarting networking in Debian involves some kind of tty checking?

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to Re^6: exec vs. backtick-and-assign performance by apotheon
in thread exec vs. backtick-and-assign performance by apotheon

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