Calling Perl's in-built system() function is easy, determining if it was successful is hard. Let's face it, $? isn't the nicest variable in the world to play with, and even if you do check it, producing a well-formatted error string takes a lot of work. IPC::System::Simple takes the hard work out of calling external commands. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/IPC-System-Simple/