It's always bugged me that the POSIX exit status can only really communicate seven bits of information reliably. (The other half of the byte is overloaded with

It's always bugged me that the POSIX exit status can only really communicate seven bits of information reliably. (The other half of the byte is overloaded with signal-exit information from the shell.) Windows does it better: there, you at least get 32 bits, which is enough for an HRESULT. Also, I've never understood where this exit(-1) idiom comes from. It's nonsense.