A TMTOWTDI not using ksh (considered harmful) - not thoroughly tested and written in a hurry (but also assuming that using tar is the most performant way for recursive copying of dirs):

#!/usr/bin/env perl    

use strict;
use warnings;
use Capture::Tiny qw(capture);
use Path::Tiny;
use feature qw (say);

my $source = qq(nose/);
path("failure.ok")->touch && die $! unless -e $source;

my $target = qq(fubar/);
path("failure.ok")->touch && die $! unless -e $target;

my $tar = qq(tar cf - $source | (cd $target && tar xvf - ));

my ( $stdout, $stderr, $exit ) = capture {
    system($tar);
};

say $stdout;
say $stderr;
say $exit;

$exit ? path("failure.ok")->touch : path("success.ok")->touch;

__END__
[download]

IPC::Run might also be interesting.

Best regards, Karl