Trying to guess what you meant, I think you are complaining that the script waits for the program to finish before continuing to the code after system. I think the undocumented (at least until recently) incantation

    system( 1, "command that you want to run" );
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will prevent the script from waiting (I know it will under OS/2 and Win32, but I think that it has been ported to the majority of Perl platforms). Other solutions were specific to the type of operating system you were using.

...but I'm not sure that this is what you meant. Could you be more... specific? Some sample lines of code is often a big help. Also, "doesn't work" is never a good description of a failure. Do you get an error message? What did you expect that didn't happen? What happened that you didn't expect?