obtaining process exit code from popen()

["John D. Blair" <jdb@...>]

Has anybody worked out how to obtain the exit code from a sub-process
invoked using popen()?

It looks to me that the exit code is currently discarded b/c the
standard __close meta-method only returns a boolean.

Would it be possible to define an alternate close method (i.e.,
pclose()) which one could use to close a stream opened using popen() and
obtain the exit code from the sub-process?  Has this already been done?

thanks much,
John.