4 ms·
It took me awhile to wrap my head around when I initially encountered it, but the idea made sense after I thought about it. If the process exited successfully,
by AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
It took me awhile to wrap my head around when I initially encountered it, but the idea made sense after I thought about it. If the process exited successfully, we don't care--it did what it was supposed to do. But if it failed, we'd probably like as much info about why it failed as possible; and so having the exit status be more like an error code clearly has some value.
- elmigranto 7y agoGood point. I think the fact that it’s named “exit status” instead of “error code” is primary confusion factor.
- empath75 7y agoI was being somewhat oblique about it but that was what my quote was saying.