Why is Perl's $? returning the wrong value for the exit code of a forked process?

Question

Consider this trivial example of fork()ing then waiting for a child to die in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

if (fork() == 0) {
        ex         


        

Answer 1

It's documented in the $? section of the perlvar man page.

i.e. the real exit code is $? >> 8.