Re: [Acl-devel] [ANNOUNCE] attr 2.4.47

[Kamil Dudka]

On Tuesday 21 May 2013 15:52:11 Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-05-21 at 14:47 +0200, Kamil Dudka wrote:
> > Providing more fine-grained error codes sounds useful.  Is there any
> > similar utility that uses the error codes above?
> 
> I don't think there's a real standard... just hat a short look at ls...
> but this seems to do it also the bad way, i.e.
> ls notExistingFile
> => $?=2
> 
> ls --bogusOption
> => $?=2
> 
> 
> It seems to be crucial to thoroughly document which error code is used
> for what.

As for ls, POSIX [1] says this:

EXIT STATUS

    The following exit values shall be returned:

     0
        Successful completion.
    >0
        An error occurred.

... and the documentation to GNU coreutils [2] says this:

   Exit status:

     0 success
     1 minor problems  (e.g., failure to access a file or directory not
       specified as a command line argument.  This happens when listing a
       directory in which entries are actively being removed or renamed.)
     2 serious trouble (e.g., memory exhausted, invalid option, failure
       to access a file or directory specified as a command line argument
       or a directory loop)

Kamil

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ls.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/ls-invocation.html