Pipe error codes off by a factor of 256

[Skip Montanaro]

    Ben> I'm trying to capture the error code from a pipe opened with
    Ben> os.popen().  I can successfully store the returned code in a
    Ben> variable, but the returned code always is exactly 256 times larger
    Ben> than it should be.

That's the way the underlying popen works, and it's documented, sort of.
>From the os lib reference page:

    The exit status of the command (encoded in the format specified for
    wait()) is available as the return value of the close() method of the
    file object, except that when the exit status is zero (termination
    without errors), None is returned.

Unfortunately, I don't find any documentation on wait's return status.