perl system echo output redirection

Question

The below code

system( echo hi there >>log.txt );

redirects correctly, but also prints the output to STDOUT.. so when I run my perl script I see

 perl script.pl
 hi there

and the log.txt file is updated correclty.

Question: how can I get it to only update the file and not STDOUT.

Note: Please do not suggest using a file handle, I have reasons to make me not want to do that.

Answer 1

You could call the command using backticks:

`echo hi there >>log.txt`;

Then the result will not be printed to STDOUT, but returned, so you could store it in a variable. But you don't need to, you can also just ignore it.