I was thinking about threads, but I doubt I would have been able to provide example code like BrowserUK did.

Also, I agree with BrowserUK's comment about backticks. If you're not interested in the STDOUT of the commands or need the exit code the commands, I think system may work better.

However, if you need to capture both STDOUT and STDERR, I believe that IPC::Open3 may be the better route to go.