Nothing wrong with using system. There will always be purists who insist of writing complicated back bending C style code to avoid using system (and you can in this case, using chown and getgrnam), but they haven't seen the light yet, and don't appreciate Perls root: being a glue language.

You could avoid the warning by checking for the OS, or the existance either /bin/chgrp or /usr/bin/chgrp (where you would find them on a UNIX system). One thing I have to ask though, what's with the eval?

Abigail