in reply to Am I missing something major here (system/exec)?

What izut said, except that system() returns 0 on success, not failure. 
system(...) == 0 or die "...";
# or
system(...) and die "...";

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Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom