system() is one of those weird commands that do different things depending on their arguments. It you use a single string argument, the return status is the status of the shell (or CMD.EXE on Windows). Most often, this is zero (success) even if the shell could not find a program to run. If you use a list of arguments, then you get the return status of the program but none of the argument are interpoled. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you expect.

Example: a single string argument:

my $status = system( "foobar arg1 arg2 arg3" );

$status contains the status of the shell or CMD.EXE.

Example: a list of arguments:

my $status = system( "foobar", "arg1", "arg2", "arg3" );

$status contains the status of foobar.