Hi rcrews,

I personally wouldn't use IPC::Open3, as there's a huge list of CPAN modules to make your life easier, see for example the "See Also" section of Capture::Tiny. A while back I did some research on all of them, and my personal favorite is IPC::Run3: Runs on *NIX and Windows, has excellent test scores, very few dependencies, it captures STDERR too, and it allows you to avoid the shell (which avoids whitespace and interpolation issues). Two things it can't do is timeouts and interactive communication with the subprocess, but I've rarely needed those. For those, IPC::Run seems like a good solution. And Capture::Tiny is also an excellent module, it's useful if you also want to capture the output of the Perl process itself. Update: IPC::System::Simple, which the AM also mentioned, is also nice in that it provides drop-in replacements for system and qx with much better error handling (it's what autodie uses when you say use autodie qw/system/;).

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D