Re: Process exit status on different platforms

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Davis Herring <herring@lanl.gov> wrote:
> [Sorry this reply is so much delayed; perhaps it will nevertheless be
> useful.]
>
>> Are there any variable that could be used to check if call-process
>> exited with success status?
>
> I don't know of any.
>
>> Is not this return value platform dependent?
>
> Not much.  VMS is the only system I know of that doesn't use the "0 means
> success, and everything else means some kind of failure but there's little
> to no convention" convention.  I think it uses 1 for success and 44 for
> catastrophic failure (with other values for minor problems), but that's
> just from a very little searching.  (It's worth noting, as the glibc
> manual says, that 1 means "successfully found differences" in diff and the
> like, and it means merely "no matches" in grep and the like:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Exit-Status.html)


Thanks, at the moment I can't remember exactly why I asked ... eh, yes I do ;-)

I think it will be useful to simplify at least my bug hunting.