Re: issues in bash found while creating command result display

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:29:36 +0800
    From:        Paul Wise <pabs3@bonedaddy.net>
    Message-ID:  <5be7a3060ecb029ac36a4592bbee7fc071becd12.camel@bonedaddy.net>

  | I wonder if bash could set an additional variable to indicate if $? is
  | from a normal exit, a signal exit, a shell keystroke etc,

That's really hard to do and do correctly.

Eg: in

        (crashes && burns)

assuming crashes exits with a signal, inside the subshell your new
variable could be created, but where you care about the exit status
is in the parent code, outside the sub-shell, and that subshell does
not exit with a signal, rather it exits with the status of the last
command that was run.   That's 139 (or whatever).  There's no way to
pass variables back from a subshell, so what do you do now?

Facilities that kind of work, sometimes, are worse that those that
don't exist at all.

kre

ps: in that example, the "&& burns" is just there to prevent this from
being a case where the shell running the subshell could simply do
"exec crashes" in which case the parent would get the exit status
directly from crashes, and could work out that it exited because of
a signal.   But with that extra conditional it cannot be done that way,
the subshell needs to run crashes, wait for it to finish (exit because
of a signal we are assuming) - which causes false as its status, so burns
is not run (not attempted) and the shell exits with the exit status from
crashes.