Re: [bug-gawk] Behavior of fflush with SIGPIPE on stdout [PATCH]

[FERRIEUX Alexandre - IMT/OLN]

On 26/03/2017 16:29, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> If you allude to MS-Windows, then the exit status there is a full
> 32-bit word, certainly not narrower than on a typical Unix.  To some
> extent, it's richer than the Unix status, because it provides the
> fatal exception which caused the program to exit abnormally, and
> exceptions are more granular than Unix signals.

Then by all means, add an ifdef branch to use that bandwidth appropriately on 
Windows too !


> This isn't about the width of the exit status, this is about its
> value, and about the importance (or lack thereof) of a particular
> value produced when Gawk exited due to a certain errno.
>
> >  Is that against portability ?
>
> The way you want it? yes, because I cannot write a portable Awk script
> without system dependencies.


No, not the Awk script but its caller. And the caller (which typically has fewer portability constraints than Awk) may 
still be written in a portable manner by restricting the test to "!=0", which is the consensual contract.

In other words:

        - those who currently argue for a strict exit(1), will always be able 
to write portable callers with !=0
        - those who need a finer grain, will be able to use it

What harm in satisfying everybody ?