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Re: ldap tool result codes

Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
At 08:12 PM 1/20/2006, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
On Unix, it can return 0-255 - but I think the range should be
at most 0-127, since shells tend to return 128 and up if the
process terminated due to a signal. Some code(s) will be needed
for error returns that do not come from LDAP protocol. And some
code(s) for protocol result codes outside the range of result
codes which can be handled this way - including when the server
returns the particular codes which we make use of this way.

FreeBSD exit(2)
  Passing arbitrary values back to the environment as status is considered
  bad style; you should use the values EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE. If
  portability is not a concern, you may use the values described in
  sysexits(3).


On non-Unix, I have no idea... Hopefully someone else knows.

On systems that have some notion of a Bourne-style command shell, they generally emulate Unix behavior. I suppose since our test scripts require a POSIX environment in the first place, we can assume the rest. I note that IBM mainframes typically only used return codes that are multiples of 4, but even they conform to POSIX when running an appropriate shell. Anyway, POSIX says the return value is the least significant 8 bits of the exit() value (or return() if the program terminated that way). That means it's necessarily an unsigned byte's worth of info, so we can't express the LDAP API error codes, as they're all negative integers.

If we're going to try to make this consistent, then I'd say all we can rely on is zero and non-zero. To get anything more specific we're going to have to rely on diagnostics that the tools write to stderr. I guess that means we should standardize on an easily parsable format for those, e.g. "Result: 49 - invalid credentials" where the numeric code is always a known field of the message.

--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
 Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 OpenLDAP Core Team            http://www.openldap.org/project/