How to run shell command from response handler? (Apache2 child segmentation fault)

I am trying to run a shell command from a mod_perl2 response handler.
It works properly for some number of HTTP requests, but sometimes it
fails (somewhat randomly) and I see in my Apache2 error log that one of
the Apache2 child processes has died with a segmentation fault.  
For example, /var/log/apache2/error.log shows:

[Tue Jan 03 12:16:10 2012] [notice] child pid 3538 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Is this normal?  How does one normally run a shell command from a
response handler?  I do not want to return the command's output to the
client.

Here is a trivial example response handler that exhibits this behavior:

sub handler
{
my $r = shift || die;
my $f = $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT} . "/date.txt";
system("date >> $f");
$r->internal_redirect("/date.txt");
return Apache2::Const::OK;
}

Can anyone provide any guidance?  Does this work for you?  

Note that you may not notice the problem if you don't carefully watch
the Apache2 error log (e.g., with "tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log"),
because Apache2 automatically spawns new children processes as needed,
and client (such as Firefox or wget, though not curl) seem to
automatically re-try the request when it fails, thus giving the illusion
of succeeding.  

P.S. I have posted about this on perlmonks, but thus far have not found
a solution:
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=945947


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.