=over =item exit EXPR X X X =item exit Evaluates EXPR and exits immediately with that value. Example: my $ans = ; exit 0 if $ans =~ /^[Xx]/; See also L|/die LIST>. If EXPR is omitted, exits with C status. The only universally recognized values for EXPR are C for success and C for error; other values are subject to interpretation depending on the environment in which the Perl program is running. For example, exiting 69 (EX_UNAVAILABLE) from a I incoming-mail filter will cause the mailer to return the item undelivered, but that's not true everywhere. Don't use L|/exit EXPR> to abort a subroutine if there's any chance that someone might want to trap whatever error happened. Use L|/die LIST> instead, which can be trapped by an L|/eval EXPR>. The L|/exit EXPR> function does not always exit immediately. It calls any defined C routines first, but these C routines may not themselves abort the exit. Likewise any object destructors that need to be called are called before the real exit. C routines and destructors can change the exit status by modifying L|perlvar/$?>. If this is a problem, you can call L|POSIX/C<_exit>> to avoid C and destructor processing. See L for details. Portability issues: L. =back