Ever gotten annoyed at how different from every other subroutine call system is? Ever screwed up your error reporting because you couldn't remember what to do with $?, $@ and $!? I sure have... and I got sick of rewriting this over and over, so I wrapped it in a utility subroutine, and here it is. It assumes the system LIST style is being used, because system SCALAR is somewhat hazardous and (IMO) to be discouraged, but obviously it's readily modified to be more tolerant.

Usage:

wrap_system(qw(perl -u -e 1)) or die "$@\n"
#perl exited with status 0 after receiving signal 6 (core dumped)

[download]
sub wrap_system {
    if ( 0 == system { $_[0] } @_ ) { return 1 }
    if ( -1 == $? ) { 
        $@ = "Unable to launch $_[0]: $!" 
    } else {
        $@ = "$_[0] exited with status " . ($? >> 8);
        if (my $sig = $? & 127) { $@ .= " after receiving signal $sig"
+ }
        if ($? & 128) {$@ .= " (core dumped)" }
    }
    return;
}

[download]

In reply to wrap 'system LIST' in a (somewhat) more friendly style by ChemBoy

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