Re: no exit status available when a command doesn't exist or fails in pipe to grep

[Ed Morton]

On 9/9/2021 8:08 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> "Andrew J. Schorr" <aschorr@telemetry-investments.com> wrote:
>
> > So gawk forces the return code to 0 in POSIX mode in almost all cases.
> Ah, so it does.  It's too much hair to distinguish "child exited with
> problem" from "could not close pipe and/or recover child info and/or
> whatever other mechanics went wrong".  So I just punted.
>
> And as I pointed out earlier, different awks do different things
> anyway, so there's no reliable portable way to deal with the
> status from close().
>
> Arnold
That's fine of course but why not just do in POSIX mode the same thing 
that gawk does in non-POSIX mode since it'd apparently still be POSIX 
compliant either way and would be more useful?

    Ed.