Hi Andreas, > > Is grep not finding a match an error? Is cmp finding a difference an > error? It all depends on the context. > Manpage of grep, exit staus: "Normally, the exit status is 0 if selected lines are found and 1 otherwise. But the exit status is 2 if an error occurred, ..." cmp uses the same convention (albeit not reported in its manpage). I am not stating that all linux commands and utilities follow exactly the same convention, but these two are at least consistent with themselves always returning an exit status that has a well defined meaning. git-config returns consistently the exit status, it only issues in certain cases messages and in others not. A consistent solution could be for it to return 0 upon success, 1 when the section or key is absent, and 2 when the config file does not exist or is corrupt issuing also an error message. -Angelo >> How can otherwise the user tell a corrupted configuration file from a >> missing key? > > You cannot, as long as your configuration file is well-formed, because a > missing key is an expected condition in many cases. > > Andreas. > > -- > Andreas Schwab, schwab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756 01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5 > "And now for something completely different." -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html