Question

Most of the places I have seen the return code values are done like this,

for success status return , #define SUCCESS 0 and other no zero numbers for all other error cases.

My question is , why we selecetd zero for SUCCESS case? Is there any specific programming best practice concerns for that?

/R

Answer 1

It’s an old C habit to return 0 for success and some other code for errors, so you can say:

int error = do_stuff();
if (error) {
    handle_error(error);
}

However, predicates usually work the other way around, returning 1 for “success” (or true from <stdbool.h>).