No. You're not right. 'system' forks a *new* process to execute the requested command. 'exec' would execute the command in the same process, but that would have the effect of _ending_ the Perl program to launch the new one (IOW, the program would never 'return' to the Perl program because it would _replace_ it). As someone else said, to do what the OP appears to want to do, they should use the Perl function 'chdir'.