Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!hc!beta!unm-la!unmvax!nmtsun!hydrovax
From: hydrovax@nmtsun.nmt.edu (M. Warner Losh)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: exit(-1)
Message-ID: <1225@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 88 01:22:29 GMT
References: <502@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <6935@brl-smoke.ARPA> <1179@wjvax.UUCP> <1185@wjvax.UUCP>
Organization: NMT Hydrology program
Lines: 32
Summary: Trivial? Not for 100M lines of non-C code.

In article <1185@wjvax.UUCP>, brett@wjvax.UUCP (Brett Galloway) writes:
> In article <6983@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
> >In article <1179@wjvax.UUCP> brett@wjvax.UUCP I wrote:
> >>However, it is hard to conceive an implementation
> >>which has multiple exit-success values.
> >VMS does!
> >I agree that probably all implementations, including VMS, will
> >	#define	EXIT_SUCCESS	0
> 
> Of course the VMS folk could live with the ANSI C solution; it *is*
> effectively the VMS solution.  It is a trivial matter for VMS to adapt to
> this solution.
Am I missing something here, or are you saying that because VMS cause
this so-called mess, that they should have to live with a UNIX like
kludge, just to make you happy?  When you exit(0) on VMS you get the error

%NONAME-W-NOMESSAGE, No message text for message 0000000

or something similar.  Remember that VMS is not really 'C' based, and
much of the code is written in a whole slew of languages.  Would you
propose that all of that be rewritten?  I think not.  The more proper
VMS implementation of EXIT_STATUS should be SS$_NORMAL, which is
(at least in 4x) defined to be 1.  Why would you expect an operating
system dependent scheme such as exit(0) to work on all OS's?  The whole
world isn't using UNIX.


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