Interpret $? variable

rbala has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks, When a process is successful I see the value stored in this variable is 0. But , if unsucessful, the value is undeterministic and for various commands, I get different outputs. But I just need to check if the command is successful or not. My doubt is, can i confirm that if $? is 0 , then the command is successful ? Thanks, Bala.

Comment on Interpret $? variable

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Re: Interpret $? variable by mtmcc (Hermit) on Sep 12, 2013 at 09:51 UTC
It depends on the command. Have a look at this. I hope it's helpful.	[reply]
Re^2: Interpret $? variable by rbala (Acolyte) on Sep 12, 2013 at 15:57 UTC
Thank you	[reply]
Re: Interpret $? variable by daxim (Curate) on Sep 12, 2013 at 09:50 UTC
Yes, that's the convention. I recommend IPC::System::Simple which has a very convenient API for this use-case. `use IPC::System::Simple qw(runx); runx [0], 'some_command', @more_arguments;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Interpret $? variable by Marshall (Canon) on Sep 13, 2013 at 06:36 UTC
Yes, The return value of "zero" usually means success. Something other than "0" usually means "Oops - problem with an error code". The error code is deterministic, but depends upon the error codes for that subroutine.	[reply]