This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE system() should return useful values =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sep 13 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 221 Version: 1 Status: Developing =head1 ABSTRACT system() should return true if the program exited normally, false otherwise. =head1 DESCRIPTION In perl5, system() returns the wait status of the program: 0 if it succeeded, a positive number if it failed. This means you can't test for failure with "|| die" as you can with so many other Perl functions. I propose changing it so that system() returns false on failure and true on success. It would no longer return the exit status of the program, which would need to be collected through C<$?> or its perl6 replacement. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION Simple change to the pp_code for system(). The perl526 translator would replace system() with: do { system(...); $? } =head1 REFERENCES perlfunc manpage for description of system() perlvar manpage for description of $?
