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

Perl:

$output = `foo`;

ADDED: This is really a multi-way tie. The above is also valid PHP, and Ruby, for example, uses the same backtick notation as well.