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points by cwillu 2 days ago | 0 comments

That's not specifically bash though, that's process exit codes

Yes. But it's still contradictory

The question you are asking when querying a process exit code is "did this program exit with an error?". The default assumption is "no, it completed successfully", so 0 (false) is the logical expected default return.

A function is expected to produce a result - so the question is "what was the result?". !0 (something) is the logical expected default return.

I've never found it to be contradictory.

[–] xigoi 2 days ago

But in shell, 0 is true, not false. The program called true returns 0.

[–] Dylan16807 1 day ago

"True has 0 errors" is the straightforward part.

"False pretends to have an error" is where it gets weird. It's not that they got booleans backwards, it's that they're stretching a tenuous analogy a bit too far.