vi exit status

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, J. P. Radley blurted:
> > 3. Because the POSIX specification for ex/vi includes
> >   in the clause 'consequences of errors' "... or
> >   when an error is detected that is a consequence of
> >   data (not) present in the file, ..." and "ex/vi
> >   shall terminate with a nonzero exit status."

This sounded really "out there" to me...enough for me to look it up to try
to disprove it.  Unfortunately, I found something that supports it.
There's a page on the differences between vim and vi at:

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/vi_diff.html#posix-compliance

On that page, there's this line under the POSIX test suite results run
against vi that differ between the two:

- vi test 310 fails; exit code non-zero when any error occurred?

Guess it's an accurate assertion after all.  Weird...I'd have never pegged
vi as being linked to the POSIX standard at all before this discussion.
I just considered it "an app".  Learn something new every day...

mark->
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