Here's a nice snippet if you want to hide console windows that open up when calling utilities or commands using backticks. Perl, being an excellent duct-tape language, makes this easy, just add this snippet at the bottom of your code:
BEGIN
{
Win32::SetChildShowWindow(0)
if defined &Win32::SetChildShowWindow;
}
{
Win32::SetChildShowWindow(0)
if defined &Win32::SetChildShowWindow;
}