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.

The IPC::System::Simple module also provides a simple replacement to Perl's
backticks operator.