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 (or 2!) in Perl....

open my $pipe, 'ps |';
my @output = < $pipe >;
say @output;

open can also be written like so...

open my $pipe, '-|', 'ps'