begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Sat, Dec 30, 2006 at 12:06:35AM -0800: > Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > > Surely you'd want to exit with 0 or 1, depending on a match > > or not, so that you can more easily use your script in another, > > yes? > > If I were to exit with a 1 upon failure, I would also dispense with the > printing of No match. When I wrote this, I was using hte input and > output as given to me on the spec sheet (the currently working program).
Ah, good point. There's many a rewrite that would have been better off had your sensible sensibilties been applied; back when I was quite damp in the auricular regions, I watched a skilled programmer reimplement a million-line billing system while adding New Features. The Boss was Not Happy that the new program introduced All! New! Bugs! instead of doing *exactly* what the old program did (hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL, IIRC). > If I had my druthers, I would do the silent failure with an exit code of > non-zero (probably 1, unless I had a good reason otherwise). Heh. Given my druthers, I'd add a -v(erbose) option, to print output as well, and a -h(elp) option, to print out usage information -- but I'm often too lazy to do so the first time around. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
