in reply to Executing an application in Perl/CGI

Your call to system needs to have parentheses for the die to work (aside from the fact that system returns "false" on success). 

system 'cmd.exe /c notepad.exe' || die 'no notepad';
# is the same as
system( 'cmd.exe /c notepad.exe' || die 'no notepad' );
# but you want
system( 'cmd.exe /c notepad.exe' ) && die 'no notepad';
# or you could do
system 'cmd.exe /c notepad.exe' and die 'no notepad';

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You could also get a little more explicit about what you expect from system: 

0 == system 'cmd.exe /c notepad.exe'
    or die 'no notepad';

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Re^2: Executing an application in Perl/CGI
by Anonymous Monk on May 22, 2007 at 19:33 UTC
    This works for the error, it doesn't launch. However why does this not work on a server end put works alright locally executed. Is this an issue with the path? Thanks for the suggestions.
[reply]
      This works for the error, it doesn't launch. However why does this not work on a server end put works alright locally executed. Is this an issue with the path?

      It may be. However, to quote from perldoc -f system:

      You can check all the failure possibilities by inspecting $?
like this:

    if ($? == -1) {
        print "failed to execute: $!\n";
    }
    elsif ($? & 127) {
        printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
            ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
    }
    else {
        printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
    }

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[d/l]
        Exited with value 225
[reply]

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