It's SOP at this point to remind you that you need to check the return values of system calls (which is more than just calls to system, but here they turn out to be the same thing =).

You don't want your program to fail silently, you want it to die an agonizing death with something pithy to say about why.

Unfortunately, system doesn't return its error code in $!, so you'll have to read the documentation on system on your system with perldoc -f system for more info on what to do with the return value. Moreover, system usually returns 0 on success, so yer standard system("foo") or die "$!\n"; is doubly whammied. You can replace the or with and to get around the second whammy, however.

HTH

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor