Perhaps you should look at Why can't I get the output of a command with system()?

Ok maybe that's not so helpful, and maybe NT can return more than a seven bit return code (I don't know), but I ran this on Unix:
perl -e 'exit 304' || echo $?
# and for the fun of it:
awk 'BEGIN {exit 304}' || echo $?

[download]
and it printed '48' in both cases so there is definitely a 7 bit limitation here.

In reply to Re: Annoying system() limitations by runrig
in thread Annoying system() limitations by Anonymous Monk

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