I seem to recall that there are a whole host of routines to do this sort of thing in the Win32:: namespace. Of course, it won't be system() but some Win32 thingy that you'd call. For some reason Win32::Job keeps popping in my head.

Disclaimer: I'm primarily a unix kind of guy though I once had to write some perl programs for automated data processing on Windows a few years ago that needed a similar functionality.