You are correct in saying -> (you appear to want to test the result of the command, not the result of the system call).

I do currently spool the STDERR and STDOUT to a file but I'm not to sure how to put this in a variable for only selected cases

Here is how I spool the STDERR & STDOUT to File. I'll also look at If you want to trap the output of the command, you should be using backticks or qx instead (see perlop).

open (STDOUT, "> $system_folder\\system.log") or die "Can't redirect s
+tdout: $!";
open (STDERR, ">&STDOUT") or die "Can't dup stdout: $!";
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Thank you