The docs do not say anything about getopts() return value, and indeed experimental evidence is that it can't be relied upon for failure checking.
It is very strange that the manual does not mention the return value of getopts(), but it does in fact return true on success and false on failure, and has done so since perl 4.0.

I would like to see the "experiments" that you tried. The source code is quite clear: 

sub getopts ($;$) {
    my ($argumentative, $hash) = @_;
    ... 
    # no "return" anywhere...
    ...
    $errs == 0;
}

[download]
So it seems to me that what we have here is a documentation failure.

Addendum: Every Getopt::Std test suite ever distributed Perl, going back to 5.004_04, tests for this behavior. So now I would really like to see your experiments.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

In reply to Re^4: Parallelization of heterogenous (runs itself Fortran executables) code by Dominus
in thread Parallelization of heterogenous (runs itself Fortran executables) code by Jochen

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