I return a error code if my program was abnormally terminated (via exit()). For standard situations, I just return the underlying errno (for example, ENOMEM for failed mallocs etc). There are, however, also cases when I’ll have to terminate due to my own reasons for which there are no system errnos defined.
What error values should I return so that they do not clash with the existing ones. Or am I doing the whole thing assbackwards?
edit: I am sorry if I was not clear with the question. I am not talking about enum etc (they are the mechanism for defining error codes). I was talking of the range of values they could take without clashing with the standard ones.
What I didn’t know was that the program can only return 8 bit statuses. So it seems like @r is correct – that is a bit too small to accomodate maybe even all the standard ones, let alone my custom errors. so 1/0 it is 🙂
The width of the return code is usually pretty small, for example limited to 8 bits, so it’s hard to store a lot of information in it. Really I wouldn’t bother with exit codes besides 0/1 (success/failure) unless your program is intended for use in shell scripting, in which case you probably just need to figure out the error cases a potential shell script might need to check for and distinguish them (for example, “no match” versus “resource exhausted while searching”).