Making a system call that returns the stdout output as a string

Question

Perl and PHP do this with backticks. For example,

$output = `ls`;

Returns a directory listing. A similar function, system(\"foo\")

Answer 1

Yet another way to do it in Perl (TIMTOWTDI)

$output = <<`END`;
ls
END

This is specially useful when embedding a relatively large shell script in a Perl program