Not sure why you're having trouble with system and exec, but these are the typical 'norm' with respects to calling external programs.

system("/bin/ls", "-la", "/home");
system("/bin/ls -la /home");       # less efficient

exec("/usr/bin/some-other-program", "argument");
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See the documentation for system and exec. As far as the rest of your question, with respects to parsing and posting whatever these "results" are, you're going to need to give us more information. If you're wanting to send data to/from the application you're going to be calling, you will need to use the process form of open, and/or set up some pipes and perhaps fork/exec, or even use something like open2/open3. See perlipc for information about inter-process communication, if that's what you're going for.

You may also want to check out How do I run another program from within my Perl program?, in the Categorized Q&A section.

We could really use more information if this doesn't answer your question.