Re: [Help-bash] behavior of -o pipefail

[Chet Ramey]

On 10/29/18 2:37 PM, Christof Warlich wrote:
> Am 29.10.2018 um 19:17 schrieb Chet Ramey:
>> My bad, I took another look at your message. The reason that pipefail
>> makes the rightmost non-zero exit status the status of the pipeline is
>> also historical. It's what ksh93 did, and therefore what the folks
>> involved in a discussion about multiple implementations of pipefail
>> converged on. This happened back in mid-2001, as part of a series of
>> messages about features to propose to Posix for standardization.
> 
> Ok. But can we agree that this converged decision (to return the last
> instead of the first non-zero exit status) was rather unfortunate (for the
> very reason that I pointed out before)?

I don't exactly buy that. It's just as likely that an early stage in a
pipeline exits due to a write error (or SIGPIPE) as the result of a
fatal error in a subsequent pipeline stage. We had to make a choice, and
we went with existing practice.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    address@hidden    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/