Ok, so here's what you want to do: listen to BrowserUK who is brilliant with Perl on Windows. BrowserUK is right that you need to focus on the value of $? after you run your system call. Personally, I like to dig a little deeper and avoid the shell as much as possible when running system commands, so I use IPC::Open3, for example.

But for your project here, using the system() command or qx{} will probably serve you just fine. Read the perldoc -f system documentation, and you'll see it's quite doable.