> On December 09, 2007 at 04:19PM Micah Cowan wrote: > I believe I already answered this: it is because a non-zero exit status > always means "something's wrong". Myriad scripts invoke utilities in > ways similar to: > > if ! wget http://foo.com/ > then > echo "Something went wrong with the download." > fi
<snippet> wget http://foo.com EC=$? case $EC in [0]) bla bla bla ;; [1]) bla bla bla ;; *) more bla ;; esac A very simple way to handle an exit code. Place the entire code into a function and it can be used anywhere in the script. > If Wget starts using non-zero to mean a "special" kind of success, > scripting suddenly becomes much more complicated (and Wget suddenly > ceases to be "Unixy"). The terminology here is incorrect. This is not a special kind of success. It is simply exiting with a specific code defining what has transpired. This makes scripting far easier. not more difficult. -- Gerard
