Other monks will likely have better ideas, but here are my thoughts.

• I can't tell from your post if printing to the screen is acceptable or not. If not, then you may have to redirect STDERR (perlfaq8, specifically "Why can't I get the output of a command with system()?" and "How can I capture STDERR from an external command?", or you can Super Search).
• It looks like your eval will trap a fatal error when the calling the system command, but that doesn't appear to be what you want. You can probably eliminate it since the system call will likely succeed (you appear to want to test the result of the command, not the result of the system call).
• If you want to trap the output of the command, you should be using backticks or qx instead (see perlop).
• If you want to capture the return value of the command, system is correct. Do you know what the return value is if the command succeeds? If so, you can check for that in your if/else and return accordingly.

I hope this gives you a start. The bottom line is that I don't think eval is what you want here, and it's hard to give you more specific advice until you tell us how you will tell the difference between success and failure for the command (output vs exit value).

Update: added a link to perlfaq8

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