Why is it that when I shift the exit code, $?, in Perl by eight, I get 255 when I expect it to be -1? Jonathan Leffler The exit status returned by 'wait()' is a 16-bit value. Of those 16 bits, the high-order 8 bits come from the low-order 8 bits of the value returned by 'exit()' — or the value returned from main() . If the program dies naturally, the low-order 8 bits of the 16 are all zero. If the program dies because of signal, the low-order 8 bits encode the signal number and a bit indicating whether a core dump happened. With a signal, the exit status is treated as zero — programs like the