Question

I’m using Perl 5.10.1 on Ubuntu 11.04. I want Perl to execute a shell script and exit with the same code the shell script exits. But this isn’t working for me …

    system($runCmd) or die("Failed to run \"$runCmd\": $!");

I have confirmed that running the “$runCmd” by itself returns an exit code of 255, but the “die” clause isn’t getting invoked. How do I exit with the correct code or at least fail for non-success codes?

Another minor requirement is that I want the output from $runCmd to be printed to the screen.

Answer 1

As perldoc -f die says, die doesn’t give a specific exit code (only a nonzero exit code). To get what you want, you’ll need something like:

my $exit_code=system($runCmd);

if($exit_code!=0)
{
  print "Command $runCmd failed with an exit code of $exit_code.\n";
  exit($exit_code >> 8);
}
else
{
  print "Command $runCmd successful!\n";
}