unix $? problem

EchoAngel has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: unix $? problem by Velaki (Chaplain) on Sep 24, 2004 at 21:47 UTC
When I run this manually in a terminal, I get the following output: `$ echo $?; echo $PWD; echo $?; echo $HA; echo $? 0 /home/MyDir/projects/perl/monks 0 0` [download] When I run the perl code, I get: `$ perl test_prog.pl 0 /home/MyDir/projects/perl/monks 0 0` [download] I find nothing weird in the code that you should return a 1, since the echo $HA as a shell command would only echo $HA or a blank line (if $HA is nothing), and thus be successful either way; hence, 0. Hope that helped, -v "Perl. There is no substitute."	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: unix $? problem by shenme (Priest) on Sep 24, 2004 at 21:44 UTC
If I run this manually in a terminal window it always returns 0, just as it does using Perl. root@budgie ldap# echo $?; echo $PWD; echo $?; echo $HUZZAH; echo $? 0 /home/budgerie/temp/ldap 0 0 This is on RedHat 7.2 Linux using Bash 2.05.8. What are you using? (Read this as you will have to tell us more to get a useful answer, which this isn't)	[reply]
Re: unix $? problem by jdalbec (Deacon) on Sep 25, 2004 at 03:54 UTC
What shell are you using? I almost get what you describe from `csh` and `tcsh` but the shell stops interpreting commands once it gets an error. It never executes the final `echo $?`. `0 /Users/john 0 csh: HA: Undefined variable.` [download] When Perl executes a one-argument `system` command and the string contains shell metacharacters like `;`, it runs the command by passing it to `sh -c`. I don't see any documented way to change this. However, you could use `system ("csh","-c","echo \$?; echo \$PWD; echo \$?; echo \$HA; echo \$ +\?");` [download] or whatever your shell is.	[reply] [d/l] [select]