Re^3: Question regarding handling exceptions in subroutine

The obvious answer is to remove the croak (or perhaps change it to a carp/warn).

You can run a command in backticks to trap both the output and the status code it returns. So you should be able to do something like:

my $response=`useradd fred ....`;
#check the status code (0 = success)
if ($? >>8) {
  # we could not add the user
}
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If you spot any bugs in my solutions, it's because I've deliberately left them in as an exercise for the reader! :-)