http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=89122


in reply to exit status of a remote program

If you can use ssh instead of rsh (which maybe you should be doing anyway :), you can use Net::SSH::Perl, which has a method to execute a command remotely and get back the stdout, stderr, and exit status.
use Net::SSH::Perl; my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host); $ssh->login; my($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd);
Exit status of remote command is in $exit.