[OT] Re: return level?

[Nick Simicich]

At 10:59 PM 2003-02-18 +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:

>Greg Louis <glouis at dynamicro.on.ca> writes:
>
> > And yours is more up to date.  A better source still is the current
> > glibc documentation:
> >
> > Exit Status
> > -----------
> >
> >    When a program exits, it can return to the parent process a small
> > amount of information about the cause of termination, using the "exit
> > status".  This is a value between 0 and 255 that the exiting process
> > passes as an argument to `exit'.
> >
> > So you're right: in this context, only the low 8 bits matter.
>
>May I ask all of the interested parties to read waitpid(2) instead? The
>original suspicion that 256 might be shifted by 8 bits is correct; the
>application that misrepresents the bogofilter exit code as being 256
>should have used the WEXITSTATUS macro (POSIX btw), but failed to do
>so. Fix the caller.

It is possible python does this to allow the caller to tell whether the 
command ended on a signal or normally in a single status value -- which is 
exactly what those macros do.  However, only one level of program can make 
that determination.  Unless there is a decision to do a "throw" or die 
equivalent if the command dies, keeping the status separate is the only way 
to allow the caller to tell "signal 1" from exit(1).

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