Checking $? should just work, if the program you called reports the exit status correctly. If what you call is a shell script or other program you wrote, check if it exits with the correct exit status.

For example this works for me 

$ perl -we 'system "true"; print $?,$/;'
0
$ perl -we 'system "false"; print $?,$/;'
256

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In reply to Re: return status from system() by ambrus
in thread return status from system() by shilpam

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