I was reading through Advanced Perl Programming and read the chapter on Eval. I was trying to get a script to work with eval and system(), but I can't - probably because I really don't understand it.

eval { system("ls") };
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Works fine. But consider this:

eval { system("fake_command) };
print "$@";
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I get an error on the second example, but nothing prints for $@. The main reason I was looking at this (besides trying to learn something new) was because:

system("ls") or die $!;
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runs but then produces an error about dying on that line. I'm probably way off the mark here, but I'm trying. Please don't flog me. TIA . . . Kevin

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