sfdisk return 1 with successfully stop sfdisk

[mzhan0170]

Based on code, seems the return value of this command could be 1 for success case.
So, if scripts uses sfdisk command, and need check the result of success, need check 0 and 1 bothly.
That's maby not consistent with general-purpose of return value 1.

Could you help update the man page of sfdisk to let user notice this?
What's your opinion?

Thanks,
Mark

[karelzak]

It uses standard EXIT_ stdlib.h macros:

$ tail -3 disk-utils/sfdisk.c
	return rc == 0 ? EXIT_SUCCESS : EXIT_FAILURE;
}

$ grep EXIT_ /usr/include/stdlib.h 
#define	EXIT_FAILURE	1	/* Failing exit status.  */
#define	EXIT_SUCCESS	0	/* Successful exit status.  */

it means 0 for success.

Do you have an example when it returns 1 ?

[mzhan0170]

We run the sfdisk like below scripts, in ksh:

a=$(print "\
	\nsfdisk ${device.name}<<-EOF\
	\n0,0,0
	\n0,0,0
	\n0,0,0
	\n0,0,0
	\nEOF")

eval ${a}
I always get 1 from the result: $?==1. I 'm not sure if this case match the case of: SFDISK_DONE_EOF

Thanks,
Mark

[karelzak]

The exit code works as expected.

The problem is that sfdisk does not write an empty disklabel by default (see man page). You have to specify "label: dos" to force it to write an empty label. Unfortunately, there is a bug and this feature does not work as expected when empty partitions are specified (fixed now).

For your use case, you need

echo -e "label: dos\n0,0,0\n0,0,0\n0,0,0\n"0,0,0\n |  sfdisk <device>

[karelzak]

Thanks for your report!