Don't forget the very useful and undocumented:

    system( 1, "command line goes here" );
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[which is just like sytem("command line") except that it doesn't wait for the subprocess that gets spawned to run the command.] Note that I don't bother talking about system( 1, "cmd", @args ) as on Win32 such (last I checked) just silently turns into system( 1, "cmd @args" ), unfortunately.

It is just too bad that the way it was implemented (the magical numeric "1" which also prevents use of an indirect object, I think) is just crufty enough that it isn't supported in Unixish builds of Perl. It would be handy even in Unix as the alternatives aren't quite as nice (and the big win would be that we'd then have a portable way of doing this in Perl).

I'd like to have it in Unix (all) Perl even with the current cruftiness.