How can I check the status of the first program in pipeline in Perl's system()?

Question

perl -e \'system (\"crontab1 -l\");print $?\'

returns -1 as expected (program crontab1 doesn\'t exist)

perl -e \'system (\"crontab1 -l|         


        

Answer 1

If you want to check the status, don't put them all in the same system. Open a reading pipe to the first program to get its output then open another pipe to the other program.