Dear Jim, dear Pádraig, preserving the command's exit code is useful for, e.g., running solver competitions, where competition participants have an upper bound on the runtime for finding solutions to very hard problems.
Imagine you want to run a command which is outputting (periodically or on-request) solutions to optimization problems, where better and better solutions will be printed over time, until the final solution is obtained. Now if the process gets interrupted by timeout's signal, the command will return with an exit code different from the one that means "final solution found". If there was already an "interesting" solution found, a particular exit code would be returned, and if no solution has been found until the signal was received would result in yet another exit code. This way, one would easily obtain the status of the solution without parsing the output. For exit code 124 one would only know that there was a timeout, but not if the computation has already revealed "interesting" results. I'm thus very interested into seeing timeout --exit-status. Best, TK -- Thomas Krennwallner University assistant . TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology Institute of Information Systems Favoritenstrasse 9-11, 1040 Wien, Austria . T: +43 1 58801 18469 F: +43 1 58801 918469 tkren AT kr DOT tuwien DOT ac DOT at http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/staff/tkren/ . DVR: 0005886
