Yes muntfish I did create a typo when submitting to perlmonks.

    return (0 eq system "$KSH_SCRIPT"?$1:2);
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should be...

    return (0 eq system "$KSH_SCRIPT"?1:0);
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Using your advice and changing my paran's made it work:

    return (0 eq system "$KSH_SCRIPT")?1:0;
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All is well now. Interestingly enough both "eq" and "==" work as expected on testing the return code. I assume it comes back as an integer and perl converts for us? Thanks for the help!!