Question

In my Perl script, if I use exit(-1), the script exits. But if I use exit(-433) or exit(-233), it doesn’t exit. Why? An example follows.

if ($result1[0] eq "Error") {
    print "Error occurred while updating https route\n";
    print "Error returned from the script:\n";
    print $result1[1];
    exit(-377);
}

Answer 1

Run perlbug to submit a bug report. Despite your incorrect argument, that shouldn’t prevent exit from functioning.

As you can see (by the face that y is never printed), I can’t replicate this on a Linux system:

$ perl -E'say "x"; exit($ARGV[0]); say "y";' -- -377 ; echo $?
x
135

$ perl -E'say "x"; exit($ARGV[0]); say "y";' -- -1 ; echo $?
x
255

$ perl -E'say "x"; exit($ARGV[0]); say "y";' -- -433 ; echo $?
x
79

$ perl -E'say "x"; exit($ARGV[0]); say "y";' -- -233 ; echo $?
x
23

0..255 are acceptable on unix systems. 0..65535 on Windows.