On 7/9/26 00:35, James Youngman wrote:
On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 10:33 PM Bernhard Voelker
<[email protected]> wrote:
hmm, did I miss a patch? I don't see a fix for that line pushed.
My apologies, I had confused the STANDARDS CONFORMANCE change I had
made with the change that you were pointing out as still being needed.
I have now pushed a change making this consistent.
Great, I pushed another commit to do the same in the Texinfo manual.
Have a nice day,
Berny
From 12dc73a97cbf254dab96d74ab1f82c1b46566769 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Bernhard Voelker <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2026 08:38:07 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] doc: propagate recent xargs exit status changes from find.1
to find.texi
This merges the changes of recent commit 1c2c1fcc33d from the xargs
manpage to the Texinfo manual.
* doc/find.texi (Invoking xargs): exit status 123 also covers cases where
the command's (normal) exit status was a value greater than 125.
Explain that xargs might in the future use other values in the 2-233
range to indicate other failure modes.
Improve the hint that xargs uses execvp rather than invoking via the shell.
---
doc/find.texi | 15 +++++++++++----
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
diff --git a/doc/find.texi b/doc/find.texi
index 4868a17d..eaa3dc35 100644
--- a/doc/find.texi
+++ b/doc/find.texi
@@ -3981,9 +3981,11 @@ standard input.
@table @asis
@item 0
-if it succeeds
+if it succeeds (and any commands run by @code{xargs},
+if there were any, exited normally with exit status 0).
@item 123
-if any invocation of the command exited with status 1-125
+if any invocation of the command exited with status other than 0 or
+255 (though see below).
@item 124
if the command exited with status 255
@item 125
@@ -3996,9 +3998,14 @@ if the command is not found
if some other error occurred.
@end table
+It is possible that future versions of @code{xargs}
+may exit with a status in the range 1-125 when the command it
+launched fails in some specific way not listed above.
+Nevertheless, @code{xargs} will comply with POSIX.
-The commands run by @code{xargs} are not invoked via the shell. The
-shell's @math{128 + n} convention for reporting that a process had
+The commands run by @code{xargs} are run directly (with @code{execvp()}
+rather than being invoked via the shell.
+The shell's @math{128 + n} convention for reporting that a process had
been killed by a signal is not used by @code{xargs}.
@menu
--
2.54.0
