Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: exit(-1)
Message-ID: <6935@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 6 Jan 88 02:44:00 GMT
References: <502@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <502@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>Except where you are writing code for a specific system (say you
>have #if cases for MVS, VMS, and UNIX) it seems like a good idea
>to pass only 0 or 1 to exit().

VMS C would like for exit(1); to also mean "success", we were told,
so the current proposed standard requires <stdlib.h> to define macros
EXIT_FAILURE and EXIT_SUCCESS.  Special dispensation was granted to
the value 0, which also indicates success (the VMS C implementor
agreed that he could make that work on his system).  All other values
of the exit status have implementation-defined meaning; they might
contain system error codes, errno values, or some other stuff with
non-portable meaning.