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exit EXPR

Evaluates EXPR and exits immediately with that value. (Actually, it calls any defined END routines first, but the END routines may not abort the exit. Likewise any object destructors that need to be called are called before exit.) Example:

$ans = <STDIN>;
exit 0 if $ans =~ /^[Xx]/;

See also die(). If EXPR is omitted, exits with 0 status. The only universally portable values for EXPR are 0 for success and 1 for error; all other values are subject to unpredictable interpretation depending on the environment in which the Perl program is running.

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().

All END{} blocks are run at exit time. See perlsub for details.