Programming Perl, 4th Edition

exit

exit EXPR
exit

This function evaluates EXPR as an integer and exits immediately with that value as the final error status of the program. If EXPR is omitted, the function exits with 0 status (meaning “no error”). Here’s a fragment that lets a user exit the program by typing x or X:

$ans = <STDIN>;
exit if $ans =~ /^[Xx]/;

You shouldn’t use exit to abort a subroutine if there’s any chance that someone might want to trap whatever error happened. Use die instead, which can be trapped by an eval. Or use one of die’s wrappers from the Carp module, like croak or confess.

We said that the exit function exits immediately, but that was a bald-faced lie. It exits as soon as possible, but first it calls any defined END routines for at-exit handling. These routines cannot abort the exit, although they can change the eventual exit value by setting the $? variable. Likewise, any class that defines a DESTROY method will invoke that method on behalf of all its objects before the real program exits. If you really need to bypass exit processing, you can call the POSIX module’s _exit function to avoid all END and destructor processing. And if POSIX isn’t available, you can exec "/bin/false" or some such.