Question

I find it easy in perl to do things such as:

   print "File not found, valid files are:\n\n".`ls DIRECTORY | grep 'php'`;

   `rm -rf directory`

   my @files_list = split("\n", `ls DIRECTORY | grep 'FILE_NAME_REGEX'`)

Is it bad practice to do such things? I find it so much easier to do this than painstakingly implement every thing. I treat Perl as an advanced version of bash.

Answer 1

Using external binaries is:

1. very inefficient
2. potentially insecure
3. not portable (thx @friedo)
4. lazy… in most cases there’s a Perl module that’ll do what you want if you look for it

In this particular case, look at the File::Glob module.