I can't use the exit code, because a nonzero exit code by UNIX convention indicates failure, which will spam people in their cron jobs. There's only one exit co

I can't use the exit code, because a nonzero exit code by UNIX convention indicates failure, which will spam people in their cron jobs. There's only one exit code which conventionally means 'success'. I could modify acmetool to output a word 'NEEDS-RELOADING' or something, which you could grep for programmatically. But this is another option (it would have to be an option; any output from acmetool is liable to get e. mailed to people via cron) for something which can be, as you yourself admit, dealt with as well via hooks. And probably more robustly, too. So on balance, I don't think it's worth doing.