You should realize that with the single argument form of system(), the shell may be called and passed the argument string (whether or not it's called depends on the content of the string, and also on the OS). If the shell is called, you will get back the exit status of the shell - not the exit status of the program(s) mentioned in the argument string (after all, Perl calls the shell if Perl finds the argument string to complex to deal with it, so Perl doesn't know what is eventually called). What the shell will return might be platform dependend.

Abigail