perl invokes shell-- interrupt ^C stops the shell, not the perl

I want to use a Perl script to batch a rep开发者_开发知识库etitive operation which is invoked with system(). When something goes wrong and I want to interrupt this script, the ^C is captured by the shell, stopping whatever job, and the Perl script goes merrily along to the next one.

Is there a way I can invoke the job so that an interrupt will stop the Perl script?

You can check $? to see whether the command executed by system died from signal 2 (INT):

Here's a full example of parsing $?:

my $rc=system("sleep 20"); 
my $q=$?; 
if ($q == -1) { 
    print "failed to execute: $!\n"
} elsif ($? & 127) { 
    printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",  
           ($q & 127), ($q & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
} else { 
    printf "child exited with value %d\n", $q >> 8;
}
# Output when Ctrl-C is hit: 
# child died with signal 2, without coredump

Therefore the exact check you want is:

my $rc=system("sleep 20"); 
my $q=$?; 
if ($q != -1 &&  (($q & 127) == 2) && (!($? & 128))) { 
        # Drop the "$? & 128" if you want to include failures that generated coredump
    print "Child process was interrupted by Ctrl-C\n";
}

References: perldoc system for $? handling and system() call; perldoc perlvar for more details on $?

You are not checking the return value of system. Add to your parent program:

use autodie qw(:all);

and it program will abort as expected:

"…" died to signal "INT" (2) at … line …

You may catch this exception with Try::Tiny in order to clean-up on your own or use a different message.