Confused on Return Status

[Adrian]

I am using UNIX operating system and now I am trying out quite a number of programs in C programming language in my UNIX environment. I recently came across a function named as system() and thought of trying out this by a sample program to get idea about this function. I wrote the below C code for that

main()
{
int a = system("excel.exe");

}

I know that the above would open excel and exist from this only when the users exit from this. But the point I am confused is what is the return status from this system() function. Will it be the exit code of the excel process? Kindly clarify me on this.

[Ralph]

Many might think that the function system() would return the exit code of the process initiated namely excel.exe. But it is wrong. The system() function instead returns the exit code of the shell that initiates the process. In your example the system() function would return the exit code of the shell that initiated excel and would not return Excel’s exit status.