in reply to Get Return Value from Unix

Please use the <code> tag only for your code and code like things -- not for your whole post! It's quite difficult to read and confusing.

You also should include the used packages so we know exactly what you use. I personally have no idea from where do you get the tee and TraceLog functions and a quick search on CPAN, perldoc and google didn't got any specific results.

I personally would reroute STDOUT and STDERR directly to the log file using the shell command, i.e. inside the system call with &>logfile. In general this task looks like a shell script would be better suited for it than a Perl program.

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Re^2: Get Return Value from Unix
by Noame (Beadle) on May 01, 2008 at 12:38 UTC
    Thanks for your quick respond. I'm using the following package: use File::Tee qw(tee); "TraceLog" is an internal function that add time to the log. Your recommendation to use "system" command isn't good to me because it's print the error to log file and not return -1 if the build is failed… Or I'm wrong?
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      perldoc -f system says:
      The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the "wait" call. To get the actual exit value, shift right by eight.

      ...

      Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program or an error of the wait(2) system call (inspect $! for the reason).

      So if nmake returns a failure it should return a positive integer, not -1, which would only returned if nmake wasn't found or similar.

      I would code this like that: (untested)

      my $pid = open (NMAKE, '-|', "nmake .... 2>&1");
if (!defined $pid) {
   warn "Couldn't start nmake";
}
while (<NMAKE>) {
    print STDERR $_;
    print STDOUT $_;
}
close (NMAKE);
my $status = $?;
if ($status) {
   # ...
}

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