Okay, a close approximation to system(1,...) for less fortunate builds of Perl is:

sub spawn
{
    my( $cmd )= @_;
    die "Usage: spawn($cmdLine) or spawn([$cmd,@args])"
        if  1 != @_;
    die "You don't need this; use system(1,...) instead."
        if  $^O =~ /win32/i;    # Not an accurate test
    my $cpid= fork();
    die "Can't fork: $!\n";
        if  ! defined $cpid;
    return $cpid
        if  $cpid;
    if(  ! ref $cmd  ) {
        exec( $cmd );
    } elsif(  1 == @$cmd  ) {
        $cmd= $cmd->[0];
        exec( $cmd $cmd );
    } else {
        exec( @$cmd );
    }
    die "exec failed: $!\n";
}
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But note that system(1,...) has some non-trivial advantages still; I didn't replicate the "pipe to child process for making 'exec fails' cases" saner.

So you can use spawn($cmd) in place of system(1,$cmd) in the code I provided in the previous node. I didn't write spawn() to handle Win32 because it was a quick hack.