[fpc-pascal]Re: Exit status of compiler on errors

[Florian Klaempfl]

Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Tom Verhoeff wrote:
> 
> 
>>Tom Verhoeff wrote:
>>
>>
>>>We use FreePascal in our education, and I am working on some scripts
>>>that help teachers to develop programming assignments for students.
>>>These assignments are then entered in PEACH (Programming Education
>>>And Contest Hosting system: peach.win.tue.nl), which automatically
>>>evaluates submitted programs and archives all results.
>>>
>>>It turns out that the FreePascal compiler also generates a 0 exit
>>>status when there are (syntax) errors.  Is there any way in which
>>>this can be changed?  My scripts would be considerably simpler if
>>>the compiler generated a non-zero exit status when the compile is
>>>not successful.
>>
>>I just discovered that invoking the compiler as  ppc386  does give
>>a proper exit status, but when invoking it as  fpc  it does not.
>>(Still under Linux.)
>>
>>Why is that?
> 
> 
> 'fpc' was later added. It does some checking of options, and then calls
> ppc386 or ppcm68k or the powerpc version. Normally it should exit with
> the same exit code as the executed binary, obviously, does doesn't
> always happen.
> 
> 
>>By the way, this is also relevant when calling the compiler from
>>within make files.
> 
> 
> The core developers never use fpc as far as I know. It's definitely a
> bug.
> 
> I would not recommend using FPC in any case. It has been introduced
> since it will replace the binary eventually when cross-compiling is more
> fully supported.
> 
> 
>>The gcc man page clearly explains the policy for its exit status.
>>Maybe an idea for fpc (doc/manpage) as well.
> 
> 
> I don't know whether there IS a clear 'policy' for the exit status
> other than that the exit status is nonzero for an error. :-)
> 

This is the important code of fpc.pp.

      { call ppcXXX }
      swapvectors;
      exec(ppcbin,ppccommandline);
      swapvectors;
      if doserror<>0 then
        error(ppcbin+' can''t be executed');
      halt(dosexitcode);


It should work correctly. So the error must be somewhere else...