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

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 10:52:57AM -0500, Ed Morton wrote:
> Since POSIX doesn't define "succesful" in the context of calling
> close() it can mean whichever we want it to mean and in the above
> example I'd hope we'd go with "b" and get results from calling
> close() like:
> 
> 0 (success) = the action we took caused the command to close, or
> N (failure) = or our attempt to close it failed for reason N (which
> includes why it was already closed if that was the case)
> 
> since that would be much more useful than just 0 if the command is
> closed or N if our attempt to close it failed and lose the
> information about why it was already closed before we tried to close
> it if that was the case.

Stupid question: why are you running gawk in --posix mode if you're
going to depend on gawk-specific behavior? If you're developing a solution
that will depend on gawk's implementation choices, why use --posix?
Without --posix, gawk already does what you want.

Regards,
Andy