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Processes can call the _exit() system call (on Linux, see also exit_group()) with an integer argument to report an exit code to their parent. Though it's an integer, only the 8 least significant bits are available to the parent (exception to that is when using waitid() or handler on SIGCHLD in the parent to retrieve that code, though not on Linux).

The parent will typically do a wait() or waitpid() to get the status of their child as an integer (though waitid() with somewhat different semantics can be used as well).

On Linux and most Unices, if the process terminated normally, bits 8 to 15 of that status number will contain the exit code as passed to exit(). If not, then the 7 least significant bits (0 to 6) will contain the signal number and bit 7 will be set if a core was dumped.

perl's $? for instance contains that number as set by waitpid():

$ perl -e 'system q(kill $$); printf "%04xn", $?'

000f # killed by signal 15

$ perl -e 'system q(kill -ILL $$); printf "%04xn", $?'

0084 # killed by signal 4 and core dumped

$ perl -e 'system q(exit $((0xabc))); printf "%04xn", $?'

bc00 # terminated normally, 0xbc the lowest 8 bits of the status

Bourne-like shells also make the exit status of the last run command in their own $? variable. However, it does not contain directly the number returned by waitpid(), but a transformation on it, and it's different between shells.

What's common between all shells is that $? contains the lowest 8 bits of the exit code (the number passed to exit()) if the process terminated normally.

Where it differs is when the process is terminated by a signal. In all cases, and that's required by POSIX, the number will be greater than 128. POSIX doesn't specify what the value may be. In practice though, in all Bourne-like shells that I know, the lowest 7 bits of $? will contain the signal number. But, where n is the signal number,

• 
  

  in ash, zsh, pdksh, bash, the Bourne shell, $? is 128 + n. What that means is that in those shells, if you get a $? of 129, you don't know whether it's because the process exited with exit(129) or whether it was killed by the signal 1 (HUP on most systems). But the rationale is that shells, when they do exit themselves, by default return the exit status of the last exited command. By making sure $? is never greater than 255, that allows to have a consistent exit status:

  
  
  

  $ bash -c 'sh -c "kill $$"; printf "%xn" "$?"'
  
  bash: line 1: 16720 Terminated              sh -c "kill $$"
  
  8f # 128 + 15
  
  $ bash -c 'sh -c "kill $$"; exit'; printf '%xn' "$?"
  
  bash: line 1: 16726 Terminated              sh -c "kill $$"
  
  8f # here that 0x8f is from a exit(143) done by bash. Though it's
  
     # not from a killed process, that does tell us that probably
  
     # something was killed by a SIGTERM
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  ksh93, $? is 256 + n. That means that from a value of $? you can differentiate between a killed and non-killed process. Newer versions of ksh, upon exit, if $? was greater than 255, kills itself with the same signal in order to be able to report the same exit status to its parent. While that sounds like a good idea, that means that ksh will generate an extra core dump (potentially overwriting the other one) if the process was killed by a core generating signal:

  
  
  

  $ ksh -c 'sh -c "kill $$"; printf "%xn" "$?"'
  
  ksh: 16828: Terminated
  
  10f # 256 + 15
  
  $ ksh -c 'sh -c "kill -ILL $$"; exit'; printf '%xn' "$?"
  
  ksh: 16816: Illegal instruction(coredump)
  
  Illegal instruction(coredump)
  
  104 # 256 + 15, ksh did indeed kill itself so as to report the same
  
      # exit status as sh. Older versions of `ksh93` would have returned
  
      # 4 instead.
  
  

  
  
  

  Where you could even say there's a bug is that ksh93 kills itself even if $? comes from a return 257 done by a function:

  
  
  

  $ ksh -c 'f() { return "$1"; }; f 257; exit'
  
  zsh: hangup     ksh -c 'f() { return "$1"; }; f 257; exit'
  
  # ksh kills itself with a SIGHUP so as to report a 257 exit status
  
  # to its parent
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  yash. yash offers a compromise. It returns 256 + 128 + n. That means we can also differentiate between a killed process and one that terminated properly. And upon exiting, it will report 128 + n without having to suicide itself and the side effects it can have.

  
  
  

  $ yash -c 'sh -c "kill $$"; printf "%xn" "$?"'
  
  18f # 256 + 128 + 15
  
  $ yash -c 'sh -c "kill $$"; exit'; printf '%xn' "$?"
  
  8f  # that's from a exit(143), yash was not killed
  
  

  
  

To get the signal from the value of $?, the portable way is to use kill -l:

$ /bin/kill 0

Terminated

$ kill -l "$?"

TERM

(for portability, you should never use signal numbers, only signal names)

On the non-Bourne fronts:

• 
  csh/tcsh and fish same as the Bourne shell except that the status is in $status instead of $? (note that zsh also sets $status for compatibility with csh (in addition to $?)).


• 
  rc: the exit status is in $status as well, but when killed by a signal, that variable contains the name of the signal (like sigterm or sigill+core if a core was generated) instead of a number, which is yet another proof of the good design of that shell.


• 
  

  es. the exit status is not a variable. If you care for it, you run the command as:

  
  
  

  status = <={cmd}
  
  

  
  
  

  which will return a number or sigterm or sigsegv+core like in rc.

  
  

Maybe for completeness, we should mention zsh's $pipestatus and bash's $PIPESTATUS arrays that contain the exit status of the components of the last pipeline.

And also for completeness, when it comes to shell functions and sourced files, by default functions return with the exit status of the last command run, but can also set a return status explicitly with the return builtin. And we see some differences here:

• 
  bash and mksh (since R41, a regression^Wchange apparently introduced intentionally) will truncate the number (positive or negative) to 8 bits. So for instance return 1234 will set $? to 210, return -- -1 will set $? to 255.


• 
  zsh and pdksh (and derivatives other than mksh) allow any signed 32 bit decimal integer (-2³¹ to 2³¹-1) (and truncate the number to 32bits).


• 
  ash and yash allow any positive integer from 0 to 2³¹-1 and return an error for any number out of that.


• 
  ksh93 for return 0 to return 320 set $? as is, but for anything else, truncate to 8 bits. Beware as already mentioned that returning a number between 256 and 320 could cause ksh to kill itself upon exit.


• 
  rc and es allow returning anything even lists.

Also note that some shells also use special values of $?/$status to report some error conditions that are not the exit status of a process, like 127 or 126 for command not found or not executable (or syntax error in a sourced file)...

When a process exits, it returns an integer value to the operating system. On most unix variants, this value is taken modulo 256: everything but the low-order bits is ignored. The status of a child process is returned to its parent through a 16-bit integer in which

• bits 0–6 (the 7 low-order bits) are the signal number that was used to kill the process, or 0 if the process exited normally;


• bit 7 is set if the process was killed by a signal and dumped core;


• bits 8–15 are the process's exit code if the process exited normally, or 0 if the process was killed by a signal.

The status is returned by the wait system call or one of its siblings. POSIX does not specify the exact encoding of the exit status and signal number; it only provides

• a way to tell whether the exit status corresponds to a signal or to a normal exit;


• a way to access the exit code, if the process exited normally;


• a way to access the signal number, if the process was killed by a signal.

Strictly speaking, there's no exit code when a process is killed by a signal: what there is instead is an exit status.

In a shell script, the exit status of a command is reported via the special variable $?. This variable encodes the exit status in an ambiguous way:

• If the process exited normally then $? is its exit status.


• If the process was killed by a signal then $? is 128 plus the signal number on most systems. POSIX only mandates that $? is greater than 128 in this case; ksh93 adds 256 instead of 128. I've never seen a unix variant that did anything other than add a constant to the signal number.

Thus in a shell script you cannot tell conclusively whether a command was killed by a signal or exited with a status code greater than 128, except with ksh93. It is very rare for programs to exit with status codes greater than 128, in part because programmers avoid it due to the $? ambiguity.

SIGINT is signal 2 on most unix variants, thus $? is 128+2=130 for a process that was killed by SIGINT. You'll see 129 for SIGHUP, 137 for SIGKILL, etc.

That depends on your shell. From the bash(1) man page, SHELL GRAMMAR section, Simple Commands subsection:

The return value of a simple command is [...] 128+n if the command is terminated by signal n.

Since SIGINT on your system is signal number 2, the return value is 130 when it is run under Bash.

It seems to be the right place to mention that SVr4 introduced waitid() in 1989, but no important program seems to use it so far. waitid() allows to retrieve the full 32 bits from the exit() code.

About 2 months ago, I rewrote the wait/job control part of the Bourne Shell to use waitid() instead of waitpid(). This was done in order to remove the limitation that masks the exit code with 0xFF.

The waitid() interface is much cleaner that previous wait() implementations except for the cwait() call from UNOS from 1980.

You may be interested to read the man page at:

http://schillix.sourceforge.net/man/man1/bosh.1.html

and check the section "Parameter Substitution" currently staring at page 8.

The new variables .sh.* have been introduced for the waitid() interface.
This interface no longer has ambiguous meanings for the numbers known
for $? and make interfacing much easier.

Note that you need to have a POSIX compliant waitid() to be able to use this feature, so Mac OS X and Linux currently don't offer this, but the waitid() is emulated on the waitpid() call, so on a non-POSIX platform you will still only get 8 bits from the exit code.

In short: .sh.status is the numerical exit code, .sh.code is the numerical exit reason.

For better portability, there is: .sh.codename for the textual version of the exit reason, e.g. "DUMPED" and .sh.termsig, the singal name for the signal that terminated the process.

For better usage, there are two non-exit-related .sh.codename values: "NOEXEC" and "NOTFOUND" that are used when a program cannot be launched at all.

FreeBSD fixed their waitid() kerlnel bug within 20 hours after my report, Linux did not yet start with their fix. I hope that 26 years after introducing this feature that is in POSIX now, all OS will correclty support it soon.

In my case, I wanted to keep a program running when it exited with en error (return code > 0), or it was killed.
I wanted to stop the execution when the program terminated correctly i.e. return code =0

I solved it by running it within another script. I have tested it on Bash, it should work in others.

#!/bin/sh



echo ""

echo "Use: $0 ./program"

echo ""



echo "Executing $1 ..."



EXIT_CODE=1

(while [ $EXIT_CODE -gt 0 ]; do

    $1

    # loops on error code: greater-than 0

    EXIT_CODE=$?

done)