Re: [BUG] os.execute reports wrong exit code on Windows

[Thijs Schreijer <thijs@...>]

On 30 Jan 2019, at 16:11, Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

This exists since Lua 5.2. The culprit is the exit code on Windows having a different format than on unix/posix. The latter has 0-255 as common ground and mostly anything else is undefined. But on Windows the exit code is a 32bit signed integer.

Now this code: https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/f59e6a93c0ad38a27a420e51abf8f13d962446b5/lauxlib.c#L276-L277
Treats -1 as a special case, and goes looking for an error message here: https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/f59e6a93c0ad38a27a420e51abf8f13d962446b5/lauxlib.c#L241-L247

This results in “No error” in the windows case of -1, since it is a valid exit code.

(Sorry for such a late reply...)

I don't understand the problem here. The documentation for 'system' in
Windows says this:

 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/system-wsystem?view=vs-2017

 A return value of -1 indicates an error, and errno is set to one of the
 following values: […]

It’s in the preceding line: 

> It returns the value 0 only if the command interpreter returns the value 0. A return

> value of - 1 indicates an error, and errno is set to one of the following values:

And this makes the result of -1 ambiguous, because both an error and a -1 return value from the command result in a -1 result.

I think the proper approach would be to reset `errno` before the `system` call and then check for: `stat` being -1, AND `errno` being non-0.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/errno-doserrno-sys-errlist-and-sys-nerr?view=vs-2017

Thijs

-- Roberto