This was interesting and useful and confirmed my personal rule, as someone who knows next to nothing about Unix and sysadmining:

whenever I think I need to use system I should always go to CPAN and find the module that does what I want instead.

For me it's worth the learning curve and the memory overhead even for just a single usage, to have these questions handled by someone who understands the pitfalls better than I do.

§ George Sherston