Exit Codes from system() not as expected

Question

The system() function seems to be returning 128 times the exit code I get from the process it\'s evoking.

From the man page:

RETURN VALUE

Answer 1

Your citation of the system man page misses the relevant part:

... This latter return status is in the format specified in wait(2). Thus, the exit code of the command will be WEXITSTATUS(status).

You need to right shift the return value by 8 (at least on Linux), to get the commands exit code.

The portable approach is to just use the macro itself.