Making a gpg library

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Michael Still wrote:
> A system call is perl is as inefficient (if not more) than the shell
> option you showed above. A system call has to: fork, exec the shell, and
> _then_ exec gpg.

Um, no.  The "system" operator in Perl will only run the command through a
shell, if it's used with a single string argument and that argument
contains shell metacharacters - more or less, "only if necessary".  This
is documented on the "perlfunc" man page.  (Oh, me naughty boy, man pages
are deprecated by GNU!)  If you use a little caution to avoid spawning an
unnecessary shell, "system" should be no more expensive than a
fork-and-exec in any other language.

Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                   :CVECAT DELENDA EST
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/