Athanasius is correct, & is a shell thing and doesn't do what you want (man bash: "If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background in a subshell. The shell does not wait for the command to finish, and the return status is 0."). And you don't want the shell in the first place. Use a module, or just use fork, exec and wait... this is what bash does anyway, except it doesn't wait in your script, so you don't get ping's exit code.

Something like that:

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

use POSIX ':sys_wait_h';

my @sites = qw(
  www.perlmonks.org
  www.stackoverflow.com
  www.whitehouse.gov
);

open my $stdout, '>&', \*STDOUT;    # dup STDOUT
open STDOUT, '>', '/dev/null';      # to make ping shut up

my %kids;

for my $site (@sites) {
    my $pid = fork;
    $pid == 0 and exec 'ping', '-c', '3', $site;
    $kids{$pid} = $site;
}

while ( ( my $kid = wait ) != -1 ) {
    print $stdout "$kids{$kid} returned $?\n";
}

[download]
Output: 
www.stackoverflow.com returned 0
www.perlmonks.org returned 0
www.whitehouse.gov returned 0

[download]

In reply to Re: Problem with exit status of bash script by Anonymous Monk
in thread Problem with exit status of bash script by dizzyd719

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