exit

exit 
status

Exits the current Perl process immediately with that value given by status . This could be the entire Perl script you are running, or only a child process created by fork . Here's a fragment that lets a user exit the program by typing x or X :

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

If status is omitted, the function exits with 0 . 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 .