Re: exit status patch for coreutils

[Bernard Giroud]

Bernard Giroud
Credit Lyonnais (Suisse) SA
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Eggert" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:25 PM
Subject: exit status patch for coreutils


> (...snip...)
>
> I also noticed that EXIT_FAILURE might not equal 1, as POSIX does not
> require it.  I recall that it's not 1 on traditional VMS, though I
> don't know if anyone uses coreutils on VMS or OpenVMS or whatever it's
> called these days.

Currently, GNV is based upon textutils-2.1, fileutils-1.10 and
shell-utils-2.1-1.
But I hope one day we will be able to port and use current coreutils.

That said, I posted some time ago a patch on GNV to be able to conditionally
return either a POSIX exit status if running under a shell, or a VMS status
if not.

Alas, this was not general, as I also needed to weaken a "not found error"
into
a "not found warning" for grep (it is a real shame POSIX doesn't
differentiate
between error and warning at a minimum!!).

Does POSIX specify all exit codes that might be returned from utilities ?
Have you a pointer to the POSIX docs ? Might it be possible to use a
scheme like values greater than 63 are warnings else errors...?

>  The patch below also addresses this issue, by
> adjusting the documentation slightly and introducing a new symbol
> EXIT_FAIL for when programs want to return 1 even if EXIT_FAILURE
> isn't 1.
>
> Here's the patch.
>
> (...snip...)



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