When I run the application locally it sets the environment variable $status to 4. .... system($cmd;echo $status);
Have you tried that? AFAIK you can't "push" environment variables to the parent process (in this case the shell) on UNIX - i.e. if you set an env variable it will only affect the current process and it's children.

I would probably just print out the value to STDOUT and retrieve it in the perl process using backquotes. Setting variables and then echo()ing them is useless overhead. 

my $output = `some-program`;
print "Output from some-program is '$output'";

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that way you're much more flexible and it's easier to debug since you can immediately see the output if you run the program on its own.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re: return values with system() by Joost
in thread return values with system() by jason

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