You should thoroughly read through the documentation for system

$ perldoc -f system
       system LIST
       system PROGRAM LIST
               Does exactly the same thing as "exec LIST", except that a fork
               is done first, and the parent process waits for the child pro-
               cess to complete.  Note that argument processing varies depend-
               ing on the number of arguments.  If there is more than one
               argument in LIST, or if LIST is an array with more than one
               value, starts the program given by the first element of the
               list with arguments given by the rest of the list.  If there is
               only one scalar argument, the argument is checked for shell
               metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is
               passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is
               "/bin/sh -c" on Unix platforms, but varies on other platforms).
               If there are no shell metacharacters in the argument, it is
               split into words and passed directly to "execvp", which is more
               efficient.

               Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files
               opened for output before any operation that may do a fork, but
               this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport).  To
               be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call
               the "autoflush()" method of "IO::Handle" on any open handles.

               The return value is the exit status of the program as returned
               by the "wait" call.  To get the actual exit value, shift right
               by eight (see below). See also "exec".  This is not what you
               want to use to capture the output from a command, for that you
               should use merely backticks or "qx//", as described in
               "'STRING'" in perlop.  Return value of -1 indicates a failure
               to start the program or an error of the wait(2) system call
               (inspect $! for the reason).

               Like "exec", "system" allows you to lie to a program about its
               name if you use the "system PROGRAM LIST" syntax.  Again, see
               "exec".

               Since "SIGINT" and "SIGQUIT" are ignored during the execution
               of "system", if you expect your program to terminate on receipt
               of these signals you will need to arrange to do so yourself
               based on the return value.

                   @args = ("command", "arg1", "arg2");
                   system(@args) == 0
                        or die "system @args failed: $?"

               You can check all the failure possibilities by inspecting $?
               like this:
                   if ($? == -1) {
                       print "failed to execute: $!\n";
                   }
                   elsif ($? & 127) {
                       printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
                           ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
                   }
                   else {
                       printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
                   }

               or more portably by using the W*() calls of the POSIX exten-
               sion; see perlport for more information.

               When the arguments get executed via the system shell, results
               and return codes will be subject to its quirks and capabili-
               ties.  See "'STRING'" in perlop and "exec" for details.