Description:

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. In fact, if you want to be really lazy, you can just write:

use IPC::System::Simple qw(system);

and all of your system commands will either succeed (run to completion
and return a zero exit value), or die with rich diagnostic messages.

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