I think it's rather (citing "perldoc -f wait"):

...it waits for a child process to terminate and returns the pid of the deceased process, or "-1" if there are no child processes. The status is returned in $?.

See man 2 wait on how to interpret the return status. Also, perldoc -f system has some sample code for properly handling $?.

In reply to Re^2: What is a successful return status for perl wait() in Solaris? by almut
in thread What is a successful return status for perl wait() in Solaris? by kduong

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