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.

Any suggestions? Have I overlooked the obvious? The Linux man page for fpc does not mention an exit status.

Tom

Do you use the fpc executable or the ppc386 executable ? The ppc386 executable should always generate a nonzero exit code if an error occurs. Our own automated testing system relies on this as well.

For the fpc executable this may be different, though. If you use this one, I suggest you use ppc386 instead; fpc offers no additional functionality yet except choosing the right cross-compiler if needed.

Michael.

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?

By the way, this is also relevant when calling the compiler from within make files.

The gcc man page clearly explains the policy for its exit status. Maybe an idea for fpc (doc/manpage) as well.

Tom

'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. :-)

Michael.

This is the important code of fpc.pp.

      { call ppcXXX }
      swapvectors;
      exec(ppcbin,ppccommandline);
      swapvectors;
      if doserror0 then
        error(ppcbin+' can''t be executed');
      halt(dosexitcode);

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