3.2.167 system

system 

LIST

This function executes any program on the system for you. It does exactly the same thing as exec LIST except that it does a fork first, and then, after the exec, it waits for the exec'd program to complete. That is (in non-UNIX terms), it runs the program for you, and returns when it's done, unlike exec , which never returns (if it succeeds). Note that argument processing varies depending on the number of arguments, as described for exec . The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the wait (2) call. To get the actual exit value, divide by 256. (The lower 8 bits are set if the process died from a signal.) See exec .

Because system and backticks block SIGINT and SIGQUIT , killing the program they're running with one of those signals doesn't actually interrupt your program.

@args = ("command", "arg1", "arg2");
system(@args) == 0 
     or die "system @args failed: $?"

Here's a more elaborate example of analyzing the return value from system on a UNIX system to check for all possibilities, including for signals and coredumps.

$rc = 0xffff & system @args;
printf "system(%s) returned %#04x: ", "@args", $rc;
if ($rc == 0) {
    print "ran with normal exit\n";
} 
elsif ($rc == 0xff00) {
    print "command failed: $!\n";
} 
elsif (($rc & 0xff) == 0) {
    $rc >>= 8;
    print "ran with non-zero exit status $rc\n";
} 
else {
    print "ran with ";
    if ($rc &   0x80) {
        $rc &= ~0x80;
        print "coredump from ";
    } 
    print "signal $rc\n"
} 
$ok = ($rc == 0);