using exit codes

[Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr.]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, David Lowenstein wrote:

> I have inherited some scripts written in csh that just work. If I want to
> modify them I have to know how to do csh scripting, and it's a lot easier
> to make small modifications to a script than it is to go through and turn
> every endif into a fi, every $status into $?, every foreach into a for so
> that it's now written in the "superior" bourne shell.

That's a different problem from actually choosing the language from the
start.  For example, I almost always write Python scripts instead of Perl
scripts, but I rarely completely rewrite functioning Perl scripts from
scratch.  I'll normally make the change in Perl instead.

> Knowing that $status shows the return status of a command is useful
> knowledge if you have a user account on a system where csh is the "nicest"
> shell that it has (like the hp-ux 10.2 systems I worked on at PG&E).

Really?  I though ph-ux had ksh as a native shell somewhere.

-a