Documentation for system explicitly says:

This is not what you want to use to capture the output from a command; for that you should use merely backticks or qx//, as described in "`STRING`" in perlop. Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program or an error of the wait(2) system call (inspect $! for the reason).

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In reply to Re^5: running command line from Perl by NetWallah
in thread running command line from Perl by Anonymous Monk

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