Question

perl -e 'system ("crontab1 -l");print $?'

returns -1 as expected (program crontab1 doesn’t exist)

perl -e 'system ("crontab1 -l|grep blah");print $?'

returns 256.

What is the way to check the status of the first (or both) programs?

Answer 1

You are getting the exit status of the entire command, just as you should. If you want the exit status separately, you’re going to have to run the commands separately.

#!/usr/bin/perl -e
system("crontab1 -l > /tmp/junk.txt"); print $?;
system("grep blah /tmp/junk.txt"); print $?;

as an example.