system() with a single argument will call the shell which will interpret the & to mean background the process. If that happens system() will return straight away.

The solution is to use the multi-arg system(), but in the first instance you also want to redirect, so you may have to fork() and exec()

Something like

  my $pid = fork();
  if ($pid) {
    wait($pid); # Plus appropriate checking
  }
  elsif(defined($pid)) {
    open(STDOUT,">$temp$file")
      or die "Cannot open $temp$file: $!\n";
    exec(qw("/3rdparty/perl/bin/sunos5/lwp-request -p http://proxy-syr
+.global.lmco.com),"$hostname$url","-C","$user:$password");
    die "Cannot exec: $!\n";
  }
  else {
    die "Cannot fork: $!\n";
  }
  system(qw(chmod 777),"$temp$file");
  system(qw(acroread -toPostScript),"$temp$file");
  system(qw(lp -d  ep5_hpp01), $temp, glob("*.ps"));
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