To expound further on the virtues of "system" check out Programming Perl for documentation of the system function. There is a code snippet for interpreting various possibilities including signals and coredumps on a UNIX system. I used the snippet and made a subroutine called sysub:

function sysub {
   my $cmd = shift;
   my $rc = 0xffff & system $cmd;
   if ($rc == 0xffff) {
      print "command failed: $!\n";
   } elsif ($rc > 0x80) {
        $rc >>= 8;
        print "ran with nonzero exit status $rc\n";
   } elsif ($rc != 0) {
        print "ran with ";
        if ($rc & 0x80) {
           $rc &= ~0x80;
           print "coredump from ";
        }
        print "signal $rc\n";
   }
   return ($rc != 0);
}
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a sample invocation:

&sysub ("cp $source $target");

Unfortunately, I never researched the reasoning behind all the bit-twiddling but it has served me well for several years. I would appreciate enlightenment from more advanced monks on this aspect of the code. Also, any suggestions or improvements would be welcomed.