I had read the documentation before posing the question.
As far as Perl is concerned it is failing with "no child processes". This implies that the called script via the system fork is not exiting cleanly. This is not the case however becuase as demonstrated in the code I put forward the shell script is exiting with a 0 and it also contains an exit 0 in the script.
I'm not sure how to overcome this problem becuase the documentation says 
an implicit fork (2) is done with system , backquotes, or opening a pr
+ocess as a filehandle. Be very careful to end the child code with an 
+exit

[download]
How do I stop it from producing a "no child process" error ?

In reply to Re^2: system return -1 by Anonymous Monk
in thread system return -1 by Anonymous Monk

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