Pádraig Brady <p...@draigbrady.com> writes: >> I have attached a proposed patch. >> I followed the POSIX recommendation of using the exit status 0 - 124 >> for >> the number of cycles and 125 for program errors (e.g. closing standard >> output). > > -w seems a bit arbitrary to standardize since I only see it in OpenBSD: > https://manned.org/man/openbsd-7.7/tsort > Also exit status is a weird interface to propagate numbers, > with various limitations and overlaps.
Agreed. I guess for most uses of tsort the number of cycles is less than that. But arbitrary limits are annoying. Using GNU tsort, one can count the number of 'input contains a loop' messages printed to standard error to get the number of cycles without an arbitrary limit. Collin