If you do want shell-style redirection, though, you'll have to use a system EXPR syntax. It's not all bad; a number of Perl Cookbook recipes use it for good reason (mostly for shell redirection).

Yes, it's faster because there's no need for an intermediate sh process to get loaded, parse the arguments, redirect input and output where they should be sent to, and pass the arguments to the program invoked.

No, if there are no shell metachars, Perl does the splitting itself, so there's no sh process involved.

Convince yourself of this by executing an appropriate ps command during each of

system "sleep 5";
system "sleep 5;"; # notice the semicolon
[download]

Other arguments in favor of "avoid the sh at all costs" in this thread are still valid. Just wanted to point out that the single-arg system does not always call sh. It just might.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker