process: use exit 1 for uncaughtException #6191
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Respect numeric string args to process.exit(code)
Since it is Unix tradition to use exit code 1 for general-purpose script bail-out, and the way of doing that in Node is to throw an exception and not catch it, it makes the most sense to exit with 1 when an exception goes uncaught. Move the `Invalid Argument` exit to 9, so that it's something specific, and clear that it's a node internal error. Also, document the exit codes that we use.
| `SIGKILL` or `SIGHUP`, then its exit code will be `128` plus the | ||
| value of the signal code. This is a standard Unix practice, since | ||
| exit codes are defined to be 7-bit integers, and signal exits set | ||
| the high-order bit, and then contain the value of the signal code. |
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I see you've already closed this PR but do you intend to document all the various internal exit codes? I suspect that most people won't care and besides, there's nothing stopping a script from exiting with e.g. exit code 4. Just the exit code is not enough to determine what really happened.
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Ah, not closed but merged... the point stands though, documenting internal error codes seems mostly pointless to me.
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True, users can use internal error codes, and that can confuse things. But that's kind of always been a problem with exit codes in general (ie, any program can exit with 3 or 127, even though bash reserves those.) Still, if we're going to use them for debugging at all (and they ARE occasionally very handy) then I think we probably ought to document them.
I see what you're saying though, and I sort of agreed (which is why I didn't document them when I introduced them somewhat haphazardly in 0.10, actually), but @tjfontaine convinced me of the error of my ways.
I'm not at all married to the specific semantics, of course. I just changed all the exit(1) calls once upon a time based on the order in which they appeared in the code. Documenting them made me realize that we could probably sort them more logically. But, meh. I think the important thing is that "generic, unspecified, userland-triggered exit" is exit code 1 (rather than 8), and that the others are documented somewhere. Also, this isn't the best place for it. We probably ought to have a "command line" section in the docs. Maybe this and the command-line args could be moved under the "Synopsis" section?
Since it is Unix tradition to use exit code 1 for general-purpose script
bail-out, and the way of doing that in Node is to throw an exception and
not catch it, it makes the most sense to exit with 1 when an exception
goes uncaught.
Move the
Invalid Argumentexit to 9, so that it's something specific,and clear that it's a node internal error.
Also, document the exit codes that we use.