sysexits version 1.0.2 has been released!
Have you ever wanted to call exit() with an error condition, but weren’t
sure what exit status to use? No? Maybe it’s just me, then.
Anyway, I was reading manpages late one evening before retiring to bed
in my palatial estate in rural Oregon, and I stumbled across
sysexits(3). Much to my chagrin, I couldn’t find a ‘sysexits’ for Ruby!
Well, for the other 2 people that actually care about style(9) as it
applies to Ruby code, now there is one!
Sysexits is a completely awesome collection of human-readable
constants for the standard (BSDish) exit codes, used as arguments to
Kernel.exit to indicate a specific error condition to the parent
process.
It’s so fantastically fabulous that you’ll want to fork it right away to
avoid being thought of as that guy that’s still using Webrick for his
blog. I mean, exit(1) is so passe! This is like the 14-point font of
Systems Programming.
Like the C header file from which this was derived (I mean forked,
naturally), error numbers begin at Sysexits::EX__BASE (which is way
more cool than plain old ‘64’) to reduce the possibility of clashing
with other exit statuses that other programs may already return.
The codes are available in two forms: as constants which can be imported
into your own namespace via include Sysexits, or as
Sysexits::STATUS_CODES, a Hash keyed by Symbols derived from the
constant names.
Allow me to demonstrate. First, the old way:
exit( 69 )
Whaaa…? Is that a euphemism? What’s going on? See how unattractive
and… well, 1970 that is? We’re not changing vaccuum tubes here,
people, we’re building a totally-awesome future in the Cloud[tm]!
include Sysexits
exit EX_UNAVAILABLE
Okay, at least this is readable to people who have used fork() more than
twice, but you could do so much better!
include Sysexits
exit :unavailable
Holy Toledo! It’s like we’re writing Ruby, but our own made-up dialect
in which variable++ is possible! Well, okay, it’s not quite that cool.
But it does look more Rubyish. And no monkeys were patched in the
filming of this episode! All the simpletons still exiting with icky
numbers can still continue blithely along, none the wiser.
I await your adulation.
Changes:
1.0.2 [2010-12-22] Michael G. [email protected]
Converted to RSpec 2, Hoe.