Thanks everyone for the assistance/suggestions. This isn't a major issue for me or anything. I just happened to notice this when I added a system() to an existing program that already ignored sigCHLD. I have a workaround -- in fact, I think the reason that sigCHLD was ignored was that there used to be a fork() call, but now that's gone. I'm no longer ignoring the signal, so it's not a problem for now.

I just recompiled a new version of 5.8.1 on my linux box and it still exhibits the same behavior. Oh, and I changed the parameter to system() to be './prog2.pl' with the same results. It looks like this account has a 'dot' in the $PATH. (bad, I know)

Here are the versions that I have tested:

linux 2.4.20-20.9 kernel (from RedHat9)
tested with both perl v5.8.0 and v5.8.1
using glibc 2.3.2 (glibc-2.3.2-27.9)

sun 5.8 Generic_108528-17 sun4u sparc SUNW, UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine
perl v5.6.1
not sure how to tell the C library version on sun

FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE
perl version 5.005_03
not sure how to tell the C library on FreeBSD

If you guys think I should submit a bug report, I'll definitely do that.

I haven't tested it, but I assume another workaround if someone really needed it would be to do the waitpid() inside of a reaper subroutine construct.

In reply to Re: Re: why does ignoring sigCHLD corrupt return value from system()? by fiberhalo
in thread why does ignoring sigCHLD corrupt return value from system()? by fiberhalo

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