I am trying to understand an anomaly in a usage of 'system' observed in perl-5.8.9 -- but not in (most? all?) other production releases of perl. Given: the attached program, 'signaler.pl' -- which I'll place in '/tmp' for convenience but which derives from CPAN distribution IPC-System-Simple's test suite; Given: a variety of different installed perl executables, including at least 5.8.9 -- for convenience I'll use my executables installed via 'perlbrew'; Then, running signaler.pl via a 'system' call from each of the executables results in a value of '$?' of '134' for all versions except 5.8.9, where the value of '$?' is '6'. I know that this is so on Linux, but I can't rule out its happening on other OSes. The attached shell script, pbrew.sh, can be used to demonstrate the problem (assuming you have 'perlbrew' installed and have installed several versions of perl thereby). When I run this script, these are my results: ##### $ ./pbrew.sh perl-5.30.0 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.28.0 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.26.2 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.24.4 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.22.3 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.22.2 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.22.0 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.20.3 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.20.1 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.20.0 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.18.4 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.18.2 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.16.3 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.14.4 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.12.5 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.10.1 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.8.9 /tmp/signaler.pl: 6 perl-5.8.8 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.8.4 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 perl-5.6.2 /tmp/signaler.pl: 134 ##### Why? Background: I am doing co-maintenance on IPC-System-Simple and have released version 1.26 to CPAN. The only test failure so far is on Linux with perl-5.8.9. It turns out that the failure has nothing to do with the module's source code and can be replicated by the shell script I'm using. Thank you very much. Jim KeenanThread Next