• This will not compile. You are missing quotes around the argument to system.
• Unless the syntax of cp has changed in Linux, you would want that to be: 'cp *.xls /newdir/.'.
• Why use perl for this, you are just spawning another interpreter? (However, see moritz's point below)
• See File::Copy
• It does not answer the question posed by the OP. More analogous (although not correct) would be cat *.xls > newdir/newfile.xls

Update: Add last point, remove recursive flag from cp command.

Update: Note moritz's most excellent point.

While your points are good and valid, I'd like to point out there is is a good reason to invoke cp via system instead of using File::Copy: The latter doesn't preserve file permissions on Unix and Linux.

(Actually that's pretty sad for such an old piece of software. There's been a thread about that on p5p during the last few months, but I don't recall what the result was, if any.)

While your points are good and valid, I'd like to point out there is is a good reason to invoke cp via system instead of using File::Copy: The latter doesn't preserve file permissions on Unix and Linux.

I personally believe this is very well known, with Abigail often advocating its use. Another issue I've "always" been wondering about has to do with sparse files: if I create one and then copy it with cp, IIRC the target file will also be sparse and a quick experiment now confirms my memory:

1;0 blazar@feather:~/tmp$ perl -e 'open F, ">foo.txt"; seek F, 2**30, 
+0; print F
 1'
1;0 blazar@feather:~/tmp$ ls -lh . ; du -sh .
total 12K
-rw-r--r-- 1 blazar blazar 1.1G Nov 16 10:22 foo.txt
16K     .
1;0 blazar@feather:~/tmp$ time cp foo.txt bar.txt && echo -e "\a"

real    0m2.357s
user    0m0.204s
sys     0m2.064s

1;0 blazar@feather:~/tmp$ ls -lh . ; du -sh .
total 24K
-rw-r--r-- 1 blazar blazar 1.1G Nov 16 10:22 bar.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 blazar blazar 1.1G Nov 16 10:22 foo.txt
28K     .
[download]

It takes some time (which further increases with the size of the file) and I don't have the slightest idea of how it manages to do so... (perhaps some fiddling with strace(1) may help, but I should be more confident with it.) But it succeeds. How does File::Copy behave in this respect? I believe it will create a file with an actual disk usage comparable to its own size, filled with nulls, ain't it?

Granted, I would regard this as a minor but not completely irrelevant issue.

--
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