note 38044 rejected from function.system by didou

Note Submitter: php@chaska.com ---- The documentation says the second argument, if present, returns the "return status code" of the executed command. It also claims the PHP system() function is "just like the C version" which might lead one to think that the "return status code" is the same returned status code that the C system(3) command returns. It is not. For executed commands that exit normally (no signal was caught), the returned value in the second argument is the 8-bit integer value passed to the exit(3) command. For programs that exit with a signal, I don't know what PHP will return, but it's probably useless or wrong data. The C system(3) function returns an integer status code, which contains as one of its 8-bit bytes, the above 8-bit exit() value. (On BSD systems, it's actually the second byte, that is, is obtained by this expression: status >> 8. See /usr/include/sys/wait.h.) Anyone who has done compiled language programming on Unix systems (e.g. C, C++) may get bitten by this misleading documentation.