Perl functions as it does to be a good fit to intuition and natural language.</p?

A shell process's return value is the only way (aside from whatever it may have written to stderr) that status can be checked. Since there are many interesting ways for a process to fail, the ability to return different error codes is useful. Hence 0 == success, 0 != error_code.

It takes some getting used to.

After Compline,
Zaxo