comparison admin/notes/exit-value @ 55463:843ab503fee2

Initial revision
author Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>
date Sun, 09 May 2004 12:38:56 +0000
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children dc9bd6dd0d8d
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55462:54d3f69203e5 55463:843ab503fee2
1 ttn 2004-05-09
2
3 The exit value of a program returning to the shell on unixoid systems is
4 typically 0 for success, and non-0 (such as 1) for failure. For vms it is
5 odd (1,3,5...) for success, even (0,2,4...) for failure.
6
7 This holds from the point of view of the "shell" (in quotes because vms has a
8 different dispatch model that is not explained further here).
9
10 From the point of view of the program, nowadays stdlib.h on both type of
11 systems provides macros `EXIT_SUCCESS' and `EXIT_FAILURE' that should DTRT.
12
13 NB: The numerical values of these macros DO NOT need to fulfill the the exit
14 value requirements outlined in the first paragraph! That is the job of the
15 `exit' function. Thus, this kind of construct shows misunderstanding:
16
17 #ifdef VMS
18 exit (1);
19 #else
20 exit (0);
21 #endif
22
23 Values aside from EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE are tricky.