$! after using backticks

[Mitchell, Ronald]

Hi.

Can someone explain this to me?

I want to check that a backtick command has executed OK. I thought I could
do that by looking at the $! variable. But I find that if I do this for
example

$output = `pwd` ;
print "$output\n" ;
print "\$! = $!\n" ;

I get 

/home/ron
$! = No such file or directory

$! always seems to be set to this message no matter what command is in the
backticks. I want to be able to determine when the command really did go
wrong. How can I do it?

Thanks,

Ron