Question

I have a subroutine that will return two hashes when all goes well. But the sub checkouts output of command and if it matches a certain pattern, it returns with “-1”. Is there anyway to check the return of the subroutine from where I called it?

Kinda like:

if (RETURN_VALUE == -1){
   do something}
   else
   go as normal with the hashes

Answer 1

You function should return references to the two hashes on success and nothing upon failure. Then you can just check the truth value of the function call.

sub myfunc {
    my %hash1;
    my %hash2;
    return (\%hash1, \%hash2);
}

my $ref1;
my $ref2;
unless (($ref1, $ref2) = myfunc()) { 
    print "Something went wrong\n";
} else { 
    print "OK\n";
}