Re^3: I think I just found a good reason to use backticks in a void context.

[merlyn]

Right... one that's more fair would be to fork yourself and close STDOUT and STDERR, which would probably be even faster. Something like:

defined(my $kidpid = fork) or die "cannot fork: $!";
unless ($kidpid) {
  close STDOUT;
  close STDERR;
  exec "your", "multiarg", "command", "here";
  die "$!";
}
waitpid($kidpid, 0);

That'd be the equivalent to your backtick-that-just-happens-to-not-invoke-the-shell, but probably even more efficient.