bjoernager/rust
bjoernager/rust
1
Fork 0
Code Activity

ExitStatus: print "exit status: {}" rather than "exit code: {}"

Browse source 
Proper Unix terminology is "exit status" (vs "wait status").  "exit
code" is imprecise on Unix and therefore unclear.  (As far as I can
tell, "exit code" is correct terminology on Windows.)

This new wording is unfortunately inconsistent with the identifier
names in the Rust stdlib.

It is the identifier names that are wrong, as discussed at length in eg
  https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/process/struct.ExitStatus.html
  https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/os/unix/process/trait.ExitStatusExt.html

Unfortunately for API stability reasons it would be a lot of work, and
a lot of disruption, to change the names in the stdlib (eg to rename
`std::process::ExitStatus` to `std::process::ChildStatus` or
something), but we should fix the message output.  Many (probably
most) readers of these messages about exit statuses will be users and
system administrators, not programmers, who won't even know that Rust
has this wrong terminology.

So I think the right thing is to fix the documentation (as I have
already done) and, now, the terminology in the implementation.

This is a user-visible change to the behaviour of all Rust programs
which run Unix subprocesses.  Hopefully no-one is matching against the
exit status string, except perhaps in tests.

Signed-off-by: Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
This commit is contained in:
Ian Jackson 2021-03-25 10:27:53 +00:00
parent 9b6339e4b9
commit 11e40ce240
2 changed files with 3 additions and 3 deletions
Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

4
library/std/src/sys/unix/process/process_unix/tests.rs
View file

@ -9,8 +9,8 @@ fn exitstatus_display_tests() {
t(0x0000f, "signal: 15");
t(0x0008b, "signal: 11 (core dumped)");
t(0x00000, "exit code: 0");
t(0x0ff00, "exit code: 255");
t(0x00000, "exit status: 0");
t(0x0ff00, "exit status: 255");
// On MacOS, 0x0137f is WIFCONTINUED, not WIFSTOPPED. Probably *BSD is similar.
// https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/82749#issuecomment-790525956