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/