From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jul 1 14:59:58 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA18754 for current-outgoing; Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:59:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA18745 for ; Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:59:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA06646; Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:58:40 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199607012158.OAA06646@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: remote make install To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:58:39 -0700 (MST) Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, wollman@lcs.mit.edu, freebsd-current@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199607011924.FAA05509@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Jul 2, 96 05:24:07 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >success/failure of its mailer programs. We have significantly > >extended this usage to other programs not being invoked by sendmail, > >because it can use useful to determine what happened to a program by > >examining its exit status. > > _You_ extended it :-). I only want evry program to print a good error > message before exiting with a nonzero status. Error codes aren't very > useful except for a small set of cooperating programs. Exit status interpretation is the province of the shell, which can print a localized error. Use of perror() in programs is recommended, but not mandatory. EX_* manifest constancs are not significantly more useful than exit status, and are effectively IPC tokens for sendmail more than anything else, anyway. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.