hmm, from perldoc -f exit

Don't use "exit" to abort a subroutine if there's any chance
that someone might want to trap whatever error happened.  
Use "die" instead, which can be trapped by an "eval".
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That doesn't sound too promising....

Do you actually need to catch the exit 0, or do you just need to know whether it terminated normally. AFAIK, a zero exit status generally means sucess, whereas anything else means that something went wrong. So perhaps you could just test the exit status of the Perl script, no?