There is no 'die' statement in the whole script

The thing is that there doesn't have to be a die statement or an explicit exit(255) in the script to get an exit value of 255. But something must be setting that value. As a (somewhat ridiculous) example, if you have a C compiler you could compile the following C program into 'try.exe':

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
 return 255;
}
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And then you could run the following perl script:

use warnings;
my $ret = system("try.exe");
print $ret >> 8, "\n", $? >> 8, "\n";
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You would find that produces as output:

255
255
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In that perl script, there's no die(), no mention of "255" and, in fact, nothing even failed - yet the 8 high bits of $? were set. (Hopefully, you don't have an executable that's running successfully and returning 255.)

How do you find out what the exit code is ? Is there a 'print $exitcode;' in the script ? ... or a 'print $? >> 8;' ? ... If we know the means by which you are being made aware of the exit value, then that might help with our speculations.

Cheers,
Rob