Hello Andrew, I'm forwarding your message on to the full Austin Group. On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 11:37:40PM -0500, Andrew L. Moore wrote: > Hi, > I am the author of the original GNU ed and maintain an alternative (and I > might add, much more robust) version at github.com/slewsys/ed. > > One thing that I'd love to see the POSIX committee explore is the exit > status of ed. Per the standard: > > EXIT STATUS > > The following exit values shall be returned: > > 0. Successful completion without any file or command errors. > >0. An error occurred. > > The problem with this behavior is that, in interactive use, it common to > make errors, correct them and then write the corrected file. But by exiting > with an error, even after successfully writing, this prevents ed from being > used as the editor for many utilties, which abort when the editor exits with > a non-zero error code. > > In the version of GNU ed handed over to Antonio, the behavior was that after > a successful write, the error status is reset to zero. This had no impact > on traditional scripting and merely allowed ed to be much more friendly, > e.g., for writing git commits. Unfortunately, Antonio updated GNU ed at some > point to follow POSIX, which is sub-optimal. > -AM >
-- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. Virtualization: qemu.org | libguestfs.org
