From Daniel.W.Yang@fritolay.com

I had a Perl script runing on AIX platform which opens a pipe to ftp some files.
If ftp is successful, the
program returns 0 , otherwise die, which returns non-zero. But, It seems "die"
return unpredicted
values. Sometimes, it even eturn 0. I read the manpage for die function, It
should never return 0. I wonder
what might be the problem. The Perl version I am runing is : This is perl,
version 5.004_03.

Here is my script.
1. rtn.ksh

  ftprtn.pl
  print $?

2. ftprtn.pl

#this is a program opening clftp and get files
open( INFTP, "| clftp CLRED1") or die "Could not fork,ftp failed​: $!\n";
print INFTP "ENDONERR \n";
print INFTP "lcd /home/dyang \n";
print INFTP "get noexist.txt \n";
print INFTP "QUI \n";
close INFTP or die "FTP failed​: $! : $?";

when I run the rtn.ksh, here is the result. Because nonexist.txt file doesn't
exist, so ftp fails.

CLRED1 has been mapped to snax11h0​:iclred1.
Connecting to : snax11h0
/usr/bin/FCFSHELL​: on host "snax2e11" execute command fcffserv c 0
Connecting to : iclred1
Remote system snax11h0​:iclred1 job connected with protocol TCP/IP​:ESCON.
clftp > End on error flag : On
clftp > 200 "/home/dyang" is current local directory prefix.
clftp > 452 Unable to send NOEXIST.TXT.
671 Ending because 'end on error' flag is set.
221 GoodBye.
FTP failed​: :2048 at ftprtn.pl line 8.
0

The Perl close function in ftprtn.pl fails and die is called with $?=2048. But
ftprtn.pl still returns 0 to
rtn.ksh. The Perl manpage says when the execution of pipeline fails, the Perl
should retrn $? >> 8 or
255 to the calling program. I don't understand why the above program doesn't do
in this way. I also
did some testing by manipulating $! and $? and got the same result. I appreciate
your feedback

Thanks in advance !
Daniel Yang