Calling Perl's in-built system() function is easy, determining if
it was successful is hard.
Let's face it, $? isn't the nicest variable in the world to play with,
and even if you do check it, producing a well-formatted error string
takes a lot of work.

IPC::System::Simple takes the hard work out of calling external commands.
In fact, if you want to be really lazy, you can just write:

use IPC::System::Simple qw(system);

and all of your system commands will either succeed (run to completion
and return a zero exit value), or die with rich diagnostic messages.