Its always a good idea to do basic status checking of even the most trivial system call. There's always a chance of failure on a live system. For example:
incorrect path setup
exhaustion of resources such as physical disk
shell not available
permissions or process limits
missing utilities (although unlikely with sed)
many others ....
system "sed 's/,)/)/' pbxiplp > pbxiplp1"
and die "system call failed: $!";