What is the valid range for program return value in Linux/bash? [duplicate]

Answer 1

When a program exits, it can return to the parent process a small amount of information about the cause of termination, using the exit status. This is a value between 0 and 255 that the exiting process passes as an argument to exit.

http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/libc/Exit-Status.html

alternatively:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_status

came from "posix return codes" and "c return codes" respective Google searches.

Answer 2

The explanation is right at the top of man exit:

   The  exit() function causes normal process termination and the value of
   status & 0377 is returned to the parent (see wait(2)).

In other words, only the lowest 8 bits are propagated to the parent process.

In this respect, returning the exit code from main() is no different to passing it to exit().

Answer 3

The return status is explained (sort of) in the wait and related syscalls.

Basically:

WEXITSTATUS(stat_val)
If the value of WIFEXITED(stat_val) is non-zero, this macro evaluates to the low-order 8 bits of the status argument that the child process passed to _exit() or exit(), or the value the child process returned from main().

So it's limited to 8 bits. You can't portably get more than that. (With Linux kernel 2.6.9 and above, waitid(2) can be used to obtain the full 32 bits.)