why status of the child process is non-zero? - tcl

Question

Consider this code:
set status [catch {eval exec $Executable $options | grep "(ERROR_|WARNING)*" ># stdout} errorMessage]
if { $status != 0 } {
return -code error ""
}
In case of errors in the child process, they are outputted in the stdout. But if there are no errors in the child process, the status value still non-zero. How avoid this?
Also is there are some ways to use fileutil::grep instead of bash grep?

Answer 1

In case of errors in the child process, they are outputted in the stdout. But if there are no errors in the child process, the status value still non zero. How avoid this?
There's no connection between writing something to any file descriptor (including the one connected to the "standadrd error stream") and returning a non-zero exit code as these concepts are completely separate as far as an OS is concerned. A process is free to perform no I/O at all and return a non-zero exit code (a somewhat common case for Unix daemons, which log everything, including errors, through syslog), or to write something to its standard error stream and return zero when exiting — a common case for software which write certain valuable data to their stdout and provide diagnostic messages, when requested, to their stderr.
So, first verify your process writes nothing to its standard error and still exits with non-zero exit code using plain shell
$ that_process --its --command-line-options and arguments if any >/dev/null
$ echo $?
(the process should print nothing, and echo $? should print a non-zero number).
If the case is true, and you're sure the process does not think something is wrong, you'll have to work around it using catch and processing the extended error information it returns — ignoring the case of the process exiting with the known exit code and propagating every other error.
Basically:
set rc [catch {exec ...} out]
if {$rc != 0} {
global errorCode errorInfo
if {[lindex $errorCode 0] ne "CHILDSTATUS"} {
# The error has nothing to do with non-zero process exit code
# (for instance, the program wasn't found or the current user
# did not have the necessary permissions etc), so pass it up:
return -code $rc -errorcode $errorCode -errorinfo $errorInfo $out
}
set exitcode [lindex $errorCode 2]
if {$exitcode != $known_exit_code} {
# Unknown exit code, propagate the error:
return -code $rc -errorcode $errorCode -errorinfo $errorInfo $out
}
# OK, do nothing as it has been a known exit code...
}
CHILDSTATUS (and the errorCode global variable in general) is described here.