D'oh! I should have known this.

But surprisingly:

user@SVN:/svn/dumps> cat foo
cat: foo: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden
user@SVN-Prod1:/svn/dumps> echo $?
1
user@SVN:/svn/dumps> cat foo | wc -l
cat: foo: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden
0
[download]

I admit, that i didn't ask efficiently.

What i actually want to do is:

qx(/usr/local/csvn/bin/svnadmin -q dump $repos | /usr/bin/gzip > $dump);

Respectively:

capture("/usr/local/csvn/bin/svnadmin -q dump $repos | /usr/bin/gzip > $dump");

And i wanted to know (and trap the exceptions) if any part of my piped command fails.

Some time ago i saw an example on PM that managed this using system and IPC::IPC::Open3. I didn't find the example yet.

Thank you very much and best regards, Karl