now I have the unsettling feeling that my code hides a spurious bug

Well, that's a good argument for more defensive coding - you said that your scripts are mainly task launchers, so I'll repeat my suggestion to check all possible error conditions, or use a module to do it for you (e.g. IPC::System::Simple). One thing I'd also check is that the processes' STDOUT and STDERR is properly monitored - there are some cases where tools might exit with a code of zero, but have printed some serious warnings to STDERR. Of course it's also a good argument for writing tests for your code :-)

For example, until I wrote my own module to simplify this, I'd sometimes write code something like this:

use IPC::Run3 'run3';
sub myrun {
    my ($cmd) = @_;
    run3 $cmd, undef, \my $out, \my $err
        or die "run3 failed";
    my $rv=$?;
    chomp($err);
    die "command '$$cmd[0]' wrote to STDERR: '$err'" if $err;
    die "command '$$cmd[0]' exit value indicates error: \$?=$rv"
        unless $rv==0;
    return $out;
}

[download]
Surely perl has a built-in library to do the same (launching a script with a timeout/kill and return code verification).

For timeout support, you could take a look at IPC::Run.

launching a verifTomcatAdminPortal.sh ... a simple ps | grep

Note that unless you do set -e or equivalent in the shell script, you might be missing errors there, which goes against my aforementioned advice to code defensively. It's something you can do in Perl - for example, you could use IPC::System::Simple's capturex to run ps and use Perl's grep. And of course there are modules too, e.g. Proc::ProcessTable.

In reply to Re^3: problem retrieving return code of an execution with back ticks by haukex
in thread problem retrieving return code of an execution with back ticks by luxAeterna

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