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)