With exit you can specify the return code for your program. Usually, 0 is used for successful execution, and positive/non-zero for indication of error. Read perldoc -f exit for more information.

I don't know about Windows, but in Unix you can do something like:

/path/to/myscript.pl || echo "Script failed big time"
[download]

The above will execute the script and let me know if something went wrong and script did not finish successfully.

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET