Re: Sytem Call Not Waiting

[ZlR]

From perldoc system :

system PROGRAM LIST
Does exactly the same thing as exec LIST , except that a fork is done 
+first,

This fork is why "the system call never waits for the conversion to happen"

Perldoc also provides a way to wait for return :

system(@args) == 0
or die "system @args failed: $?"

[almut]

This fork is why "the system call never waits for the conversion to happen"

This is wrong.  system always waits for the command to complete. The only case where it won't wait is if the command itself forks another time to run in the background, because in this case the command's parent process will exit immediately.