My os is solaris 10. Stating the problem again. I am invoking the script x.pl from y.pl as system(x.pl); my $exit_status = $? >> 8; I am capturing the status always. It sometimes happen that x.pl is able to execute successfuly (it updates a database before exiting). But capturing the error status in y.pl shows the system(x.pl) has a exit status of segmentation fault.