How do you get the value of $? from a command run as a different user?

sudo's documentation (at least my sudo's documentation) says that it returns the return value of the program it executes. All my tests indicate that it does what it purports.


Why does CHILD_ERROR = Illegal seek return for successful commands?

I think you mean $ERRNO. But I have no clue :-) Backticks and qx() do some work to gather the output of the command executed, and only promise to set $? with the status of the command executed. I guess it's possible that they do some funky busines that sets $! in the process, but again, I sure don't know.


Is there any point to trying to refactor this style of coding, or is it better to start over from scratch?

I sure don't mind shelling out work when it's appropriate.

A couple of reccomendations (which you have probably already thought about):

In places where you don't care about the output of the commands, use system() instead of backticks, since it doesn't suffer from the overhead of capturing the command's output.

If you find yourself doing a bunch of parsing of command ouput, someone may have written a module for it. For example, instead of doing filter_results( `ps -elf` );, use Proc::ProcessTable.

I'll be very curious to hear the answer to your second question. In the mean time, good luck!

-- dug