On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:30:01 +0000, MRAB wrote: >> I don't understand that. Exit status codes on all systems I'm familiar >> with are limited to 0 through 255. What operating system are you using? >> >> Assuming your system allows two-byte exit statuses, you should check >> the documentation for echo and the shell to see why it is returning >> 256. >> > In some OSs the exit status consists of 2 fields, one being the child > process's exit status and the other being supplied by the OS.
Which OSes? > The reason is simple. What if the child process terminated abnormally? > You'd like an exit status to tell you that, Which it does. Anything other than 0 is an error. I see that, for example, if I interrupt "sleep 30" with ctrl-C instead of waiting for it to exit normally, it returns with an exit status of 130. [st...@soy ~]$ sleep 3 # no interrupt [st...@soy ~]$ echo $? 0 [st...@soy ~]$ sleep 3 # interrupt with ctrl-C [st...@soy ~]$ echo $? 130 I get the same result on a Linux box and a Solaris box, both running bash. > but you wouldn't want it to > be confused with the child process's own exit status, assuming that it > had terminated normally. I don't understand what you mean here. Why are you assuming it terminated normally if it terminated abnormally? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
