On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 10:38:45PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > "Only the least significant 8 bits (that is, status & 0377) shall be > available to a waiting parent process". So it is not just "at least on > Linux" but is a well defined behaviour. > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/exit.html Ah, thanks. I read that same text in the Linux manpage but didn't think to check that it was POSIX. However, some of our systems aren't quite POSIX...check out 2488df84 (builtin run_command: do not exit with -1) by Johannes Sixt [who is now cc'd]. I assume that was a Windows fallout. > I would however agree that when we do mean 255 we should probably write > 255, not (-1). It is easier to document things that way. I started to fix the callsites that Stephan mentioned, but it really is convenient to be able to 'return error("foo")' (or even return func_that_calls_error(), and tracking down deep calls is time consuming and error prone). So maybe we should just enhance the change from 2488df84 and special case "-1" into "1"? diff --git a/git.c b/git.c index 6b600b5..4f28e8c 100644 --- a/git.c +++ b/git.c @@ -240,7 +240,7 @@ static int run_command(struct cmd_struct *p, int argc, const char **argv) status = p->fn(argc, argv, prefix); if (status) - return status & 0xff; + return status == -1 ? 1 : status & 0xff; /* Somebody closed stdout? */ if (fstat(fileno(stdout), &st)) -Peff -- 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
