How about just using back-tick? return `pwd`;

Since this sort of thing is done so often, the "back-tick" quote-mark causes the enclosing command to be executed and the result returned as a character string. Your entire subroutine becomes ... unnecessary.   :-O

On my keyboard, this character (along with tilde "~") is located on the upper-left side, to the left of the numeral-"1" key.

“This is Perl. There is more than one way to do it.™ ”