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

[Neil R. Ormos]

Ed Morton wrote:
> Neil R. Ormos wrote:

>> the notion that we somehow don't know what "if
>> the close was successful" means is a fiction.

> We'll have to agree to disagree. If someone told
> me to write a function foo() to release some
> resource X and return success if foo() succeeded
> my first question would be "what should it
> return if X is already idle".

The inability to close() something because it was already closed or never 
opened in the first place is recognized as an "error" and the value returned by 
close() is -1.  See the manual.  That is the "otherwise" condition in the POSIX 
spec.

As demonstrated earlier, a non-zero return code from some piped command (or the 
shell) does not defeat the operation of close().

Reiterating: it's Arnold and Andy you have to convince.