Can someone explain just how that == is working or what its doing?

By operator precedence,   return $status == 0 ? 0 : 1; is treated as   return ($status == 0) ? 0 : 1; which is a stylistic way of saying "return 0 if $status is 0, otherwise return 1".

Other ways to write this include

  if ( $status == 0 ) {
      return 0;
  } else {
      return 1;
}
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which is what you might expect a junior C programmer to write, or

  return 0 if $status == 0;
  return 1;
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which you might see a Perl programmer write if they eschew the trinary operator.