On 18/02/2015 14:55, Olivier Brunel wrote:
But isn't the whole anything >= 128 will be reported as 128, and anything higher is actually 128+signum also a convention that both needs to agree upon?
Sure, but most commands exit <128 so that's reliable enough, and it's a lot easier to follow than the whole pipe shebang. It's much, much simpler to exit with a given code than to write stuff to a pipe (what do you do if it blocks ? what do you do if you're fd-constrained ? what do you do if setting up the plumbing in the parent fails for whatever reason ? etc. etc.)
Noting that shells do not actually clamp the exit code to 128.
Indeed, but it comes at the price of uncertainty - you get accurate information if you're lucky, and complete misinformation if you're not. It works for shells most of the time because you don't manually nest shells - it's much riskier for execline.
Just the difference shall probably be pointed out/documented.)
Definitely. -- Laurent
