What I don’t like about backticks in Ruby is that they “ignore” errors in commands you run. It’s up to the program author to remember to check $? for the last executed command’s exit status. And guess how many times the average Ruby script using this feature implements error handling? Usually it’s totally forgotten.

To be safe, abstractions that make it easy to shell out must also:

- escape all variable interpolations by default using “shellwords” or similar.

- throw exceptions on error by default.

Backticks in Ruby are very easy to use, but aren’t safe.