My guess: it'll be a lot easier to offer a good explanation if you show us your code.

If I understand what you wrote as you wrote it (intended?), your description doesn't match the way system works -- c.f. perldoc -f system: 

system LIST
system PROGRAM LIST
       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 exit. ....

In reply to Re: Perl script to wait for a program to finish by ww
in thread Perl script to wait for a program to finish by renzosilv

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