mcgrew@ichthous.Eng.Sun.COM (Darin McGrew) (01/04/91)
In article <2577@wn1.sci.kun.nl> hansm@cs.kun.nl (Hans Mulder) writes: >Both the v7 and the SVR2 sh manuals mention that >"the exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command". > >The problem is the the word "last" is ambiguous. > >The v7 sh takes it to mean "last to terminate", SVR2 interprets it as >"rightmost". An interesting glitch I ran into with a sh from a BSD port (running SunOS 4.1, it works as expected). The script (sleep 5; false)& if (sleep 10) then echo true else echo false fi would echo "false" because the exit status from the backgrounded subshell would clobber the exit status of other subshell. This caused all manner of havoc in a script that forked several background shells, and figuring out what was going wrong was a lot of fun. Darin McGrew mcgrew@Eng.Sun.COM Affiliation stated for identification purposes only.