Perl Best Practices isn't a new book. Pervasive testing took over the (Perl) world a decade ago. There are lots of people doing serious development with Perl.
But that kind of code won't go away, since Perl is a system administration language. It will be the first language lots of people use for fixing things in their file systems, batch download of web pages, etc. Such code will never be pretty. And there is nothing wrong with that.
And btw, I'd use one of the many CPAN modules for fork/exec, but if I was in a hurry I'd copy the Perldoc example. It is a standard idiom in the Unix world.
But that kind of code won't go away, since Perl is a system administration language. It will be the first language lots of people use for fixing things in their file systems, batch download of web pages, etc. Such code will never be pretty. And there is nothing wrong with that.
And btw, I'd use one of the many CPAN modules for fork/exec, but if I was in a hurry I'd copy the Perldoc example. It is a standard idiom in the Unix world.