It's impossible to do exactly what you describe. The exit status of a program isn't returned until it exits, at which point there would have to be another program waiting around to report what happened.

I'd be surprised if creating 2 processes for each task is really a problem. The "wrapper" program would just start another script then go to sleep, at which point it would use an extremely small amount of system resources. I frequently start up chains of programs from cron, and have never had problems with this.

But, you can get close to what you want by using do, as chibiryuu suggests, and overriding exit:

my $prog = shift;
eval {
  sub exit { die "exit $_[0]\n"; }
  do '$prog'
    or die "Couldn't run '$prog': $!\n";
};
print "'$prog' results: $@\n";

my $childexit;
if (!$@) {
  $childexit = 0;
} elsif ($@ =~ /^exit (\d+)$/) {
  $childexit = $1;
} else {
  $childexit = 1;
}
CORE::exit($childexit);
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See perlfunc#do-EXPR; that sounds like what you want.

If these are scripts you don't have control over, though, I'd still fork, just to separate them and make sure they can't clobber anything in your script.

I'll have to try using do, and see if I can retain the exit status of my intended script.

I'm trying to avoid forking because there will be a LOT of scripts that're going to be launched from cron, and I'd rather not have two processes per script. As I'm sure the SAs would agree.

In any event, I really don't want to try to replace cron with a custom scheduler system, but we definitely want to track what ran, how it completed, and log it somewhere. This seems like the best approach. Any other ideas?

Thanks

# crontab file:
1 1 1 * * /home/me/bin/monthly_job || echo monthly job failed
2 2 * * 2 /home/me/bin/weekly_job && echo weekly job succeeded
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#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;

#my $cmd = 'ls -la'; 
my $cmd = 'date';

my $pid = open3(\*WRITER, \*READER, \*ERROR, $cmd);
# if \*ERROR is set to 0, stderr will be combined with stdout 
# set \*WRITER to 0 unless you need to write to stdin 

while( my $output = <READER> ) {
          #can send this to files      
          print "output->$output";
      }

while( my $errout = <ERROR> ) {
             #can send this to files      
             print "err->$errout";
      }

waitpid( $pid, 0 ) or die "$!\n";
my $retval = $?;

print "pid->$pid\nretval->$retval\n";
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