man perlfunc tells me (about the system command):

"Does exactly the same thing as "exec LIST", except that a fork is done first, and the parent process waits for the child process to complete."

I recently wrote a perl program: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

[set up some stuff]

foreach my $val (@vals)
    {

    [set up some more stuff]

    system "/usr/bin/mplayer -arg1 -arg2 $file";
    }

[download]
I expected these to get executed sequentially. Instead, the program started, let's just say "a lot," of these simultaneously, leading to a significant disaster.

I eventually got around this by slamming a sleep statement in the loop, but I want to know what I missed, or basically why it didn't behave as I expected (allowing mplayer to finish executing before continuing).

In reply to The system command and waiting for the child process to finish by Anonymous Monk

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