Thanks for everyone's response. helgi response makes a lot of sense. I keep forgetting that they are magic variables with super powers.

I guess that the thing that I find really puzzling is how $! and $? act completely different when sudo is thrown into the mix:

$> perl sudotest.pl
Password:
sudo: /foo/bar/paco: command not found
$ sudo /foo/bar/paco
ERRNO       =
CHILD_ERROR = 256

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Can't exec "/foo/bar/paco": No such file or directory at sudotest.pl l
+ine 8.
$ /foo/bar/paco
ERRNO       = No such file or directory
CHILD_ERROR = -1
Use of uninitialized value in print at sudotest.pl line 12.

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$ ls -laF
ERRNO       = Illegal seek
CHILD_ERROR = 0
total 138
drwxrwxrwx   5 ignatz paco       1024 Jan 16 15:16 ./
drwxr-xr-x  21 ignatz paco       1536 Jan 16 15:34 ../
drwxrwxrwx   2 ignatz paco        512 Dec 18 15:30 CVS/
-rw-r--r--   1 ignatz paco        298 Jan 16 14:44 sudotest.pl


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[download]

I should have included this in the first place.

()-()
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