Re: exit status of rm

[Jim Meyering]

address@hidden (James Youngman) wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 08:45:05PM +0000, Eric Blake wrote:
>> This puts the invocation of rm without arguments in the
>> implementation's realm, where currently, coreutils is not consistent
>> on what it returns:
>>
>> $ rm
>> rm: missing operand
>> Try `rm --help' for more information.
>> $ echo $?   # used improperly
>> 1
>> $ rm -f
>> $ echo $?    # all (zero) calls to unlink succeeded
>> 0
>
> Personally I think this is exactly the right way to do it (both
> cases).

Same here.

FYI, Solaris' /bin/rm is similar (though it's 2 and 0).
On NetBSD 1.6 /bin/rm exits with status 1 in both cases.