If you need the PID you might want to look at fork and exec. fork will return the childs pid, you can then have the child exec the system call. As I understand it, this is what system() does at it's core. Check out perldoc -f fork and perldoc -f exec for examples and details. I wrote the following that seems to work, no error checking though.

use strict;
use warnings;

$SIG{CHLD} = '"IGNORE"';

my $child = fork();

if ($child) {
    print "I'm the parent, I think I'll wait for the child $child...\n
+";
    waitpid($child, 0);
} else {
    exec ("ls");
}
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Good Luck,
Ira.

"So... What do all these little arrows mean?"
~unknown