system() is one of those weird commands that do different things depending on their arguments. It you use a single string argument, the return status is the status of the shell (or CMD.EXE on Windows). Most often, this is zero (success) even if the shell could not find a program to run.

I'm not seeing that:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my $status = system( "foobar arg1 arg2 arg3" );
say $status;

--output:--
Can't exec "foobar": No such file or directory at 2perl.pl line 5.
-1

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os x 10.4.11

In reply to Re: return value from system call, exit status, shift right 8, bitwise and, $? by 7stud
in thread return value from system call, exit status, shift right 8, bitwise and, $? by Anonymous Monk

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