Are there any standard exit status codes in Linux?

Question

A process is considered to have completed correctly in Linux if its exit status was 0.

I\'ve seen that segmentation faults often result in an exit status of 11, thou

Answer 1

None of the older answers describe exit status 2 correctly. Contrary to what they claim, status 2 is what your command line utilities actually return when called improperly. (Yes, an answer can be nine years old, have hundreds of upvotes, and still be wrong.)

Here is the real, long-standing exit status convention for normal termination, i.e. not by signal:

• Exit status 0: success
• Exit status 1: "failure", as defined by the program
• Exit status 2: command line usage error

For example, diff returns 0 if the files it compares are identical, and 1 if they differ. By long-standing convention, unix programs return exit status 2 when called incorrectly (unknown options, wrong number of arguments, etc.) For example, diff -N, grep -Y or diff a b c will all result in $? being set to 2. This is and has been the practice since the early days of Unix in the 1970s.

The accepted answer explains what happens when a command is terminated by a signal. In brief, termination due to an uncaught signal results in exit status 128+[. E.g., termination by SIGINT (signal 2) results in exit status 130.

Notes

1. Several answers define exit status 2 as "Misuse of bash builtins". This applies only when bash (or a bash script) exits with status 2. Consider it a special case of incorrect usage error.

2. In sysexits.h, mentioned in the most popular answer, exit status EX_USAGE ("command line usage error") is defined to be 64. But this does not reflect reality: I am not aware of any common Unix utility that returns 64 on incorrect invocation (examples welcome). Careful reading of the source code reveals that sysexits.h is aspirational, rather than a reflection of true usage:

    *    This include file attempts to categorize possible error
    *    exit statuses for system programs, notably delivermail
    *    and the Berkeley network.
   
    *    Error numbers begin at EX__BASE [64] to reduce the possibility of 
    *    clashing with oth­er exit statuses that random programs may 
    *    already return. 
   

   In other words, these definitions do not reflect the common practice at the time (1993) but were intentionally incompatible with it. More's the pity.