Follow-up Comment #7, bug #67612 (group groff):

[comment #5 comment #5:]

> $ echo 'Yo!' | groff -Tpdf -P--pdfver=1.5 > /dev/null
> gropdf: warning: Only pdf versions 1.4 or 1.7 are supported, not '1.5'
> $ echo $?
> 4


Is use of exit status 4 necessary?  Is _gropdf_ already using status 3 for
something?

Conventionally, in _groff_, we assign exit statuses of low value meanings in
alignment with common practice.

0: success
1: false; expected failure; unable to perform desired operation
2: usage error

_groff_, the program, also relies upon this convention because it assumes the
programs it assembles into a pipeline (including output drivers like _gropdf_)
will use at most the two lowest-order bits of the exit status to communicate
information.

_groff_(1):


Exit status
     groff exits successfully (with status 0) if either of the options
     -h or --help is specified, status 2 if the program cannot interpret
     its command‐line arguments, and status 1 if it encounters an error
     during operation.  Otherwise, groff runs a pipeline to process its
     input; if all commands within the pipeline exit successfully, groff
     does likewise.  If not, groff’s exit status encodes a summary of
     problems encountered, setting bit 2 if a command exited with a
     failure status, bit 3 if a command was terminated with a signal,
     and bit 4 if a command could not be executed.  (Thus, if all three
     misfortunes befall one’s pipeline, groff exits with status 2^2 +
     2^3 + 2^4 = 4+8+16 = 28.)  To troubleshoot pipeline problems, re‐
     run the groff command with the -V option and break the reported
     pipeline down into separate stages, inspecting the exit status of,
     and diagnostic messages emitted by, each command.




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