Bug 945110 – [Future EAPI] Wrapper for command exit status

• Product: Gentoo Hosted Projects
• Status: CONFIRMED ---

[Description Ulrich Müller 2024-11-27 12:20:57 UTC]

This was suggested in bug 566342 comment #30; filing a separate bug for it.

> In my opinion, even adding a wrapper to coalesce grep exit status would be a
> cleaner approach here, however bad an idea that is.

So the idea would be to add a wrapper (name and exact API to be discussed) that would map a given (single, or list of) exit status to 0, as in this example:

$ true | map_status 1 grep foo | true; pipestatus; echo $?
0

Then again, doing this explicitly isn't much longer, e.g. the second command in the example above could be replaced by "{ grep foo || [[ $? -eq 1 ]]; }".

Also, are there any use cases other than grep? As pointed out by mgorny, in many cases sed can be used instead of grep, in order to avoid exit status 1.

[Comment 1 Ulrich Müller 2024-11-27 12:36:04 UTC]

(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #0)
> Also, are there any use cases other than grep? As pointed out by mgorny, in
> many cases sed can be used instead of grep, in order to avoid exit status 1.

If there aren't, we could alternatively think of just adding a wrapper for grep that would return 0 instead of 1. (Unfortunately, the name "egrep" is already taken ...)

Again, not sure if it's worth the effort.