perldoc system

The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the "wait" call. To get the actual exit value, shift right by eight (see below).

Or maybe you want the $? variable (see perldoc perlvar for details).

When I run the application locally it sets the environment variable $status to 4. .... system($cmd;echo $status);

I would probably just print out the value to STDOUT and retrieve it in the perl process using backquotes. Setting variables and then echo()ing them is useless overhead.

my $output = `some-program`;
print "Output from some-program is '$output'";
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Thanks. This is what I'll do.

What exactly are you having problems with? This is quite well documented in system's documentation.

my $rv = system('perl -e "exit(123)"');

die("Unable to launch command: $!\n")
   if $rv == -1;

die("Child died with signal ", ($rv & 127), "\n")
   if $rv & 127;

die("Child exited with value ", ($rv >> 8), "\n")
   if $rv >> 8;

print("Child exited successfully\n");
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outputs

Child exited with value 123
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Keep in mind that system("$cmd; echo $status"); will return the error code of the shell used to launch these two commands, which will be the error code of echo if nothing goes wrong.

When I run the application locally it sets the environment variable $status to 4.

Oh? How do you run it? Do you source it? Eval it? Are you on unix or a unix-like OS? If what you claim is true, you should theoretically be able to system("$cmd; exit \$status") but your command should not be able to affect its parent's shell.

Oh, wait... do you use csh tcsh or something?... that would explain $status. (I'm bourne-shell-centric, I guess.)