• H. S. Teoh (25/25) Feb 25 2012 What should the return value of std.process.system be?

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh quickfur.ath.cx> writes:

What should the return value of std.process.system be?

I'm looking at issue 6926, and upon investigation found that
std.process.system always returns WEXITSTATUS(status) regardless of the
value of WIFEXITED(status). This means that if the child process exits
with a signal or dumps core, it may still return 0, whereas one would
expect it should return some non-zero value.

The comments in the code indicate that WEXITSTATUS(status) is used to
provide maximum convenience (no need to use another macro/translation
scheme to get at the return code, uniformity with Windows, etc.), but
the current behaviour is obviously broken.

There's currently a check for status==-1, in which case -1 is returned.
I think we should extend this so that if WIFEXITED(status) is false,
then -1 should be returned. What do y'all think?

Furthermore, the version(Posix) block doesn't use any of the C macros at
all, but has (status & 0xff00)>>>8, which equals WEXITSTATUS(status) on
Linux systems. Do we know for sure that this is correct across *all*
Unixen? AFAIK, the Posix spec leaves the details of WEXITSTATUS up to
implementation. If so, the current implementation is technically broken.

What's the best way to fix this? I'm inclined to move the implementation
of this function into C, at least for version(Posix), so that we can get
at the C macros and be sure that the result will be correct.

Comments?


T

-- 
People tell me that I'm skeptical, but I don't believe it.