Grawburg wrote: > I have a piece of code written for a Raspberry Pi with no explanation for > two of the lines -- and I can't find an explanation I understand. > > Here are the lines: > if os.system('modprobe --first-time -q w1_gpio') ==0 > > if os.system('modprobe -q w1_gpio') == 256: > > > > I know what the 'modprobe...' is, it's the 0 and the 256 I don't get. > Where do these numbers come from? I recognize they're some kind of error > returns, but don't know what they mean.
By convention a return value of 0 means that the invoked program terminated normally, non-zero returns indicate an error. For the details you have to look into the modprobe documentation. The invoked program is free to return a value in the range 0...255 which then goes into the upper byte of the return value of os.system(). For example let's use python instead of modprobe: >>> os.system("python -c 'exit(42)'") 10752 You don't recognize the 42? Then how about >>> os.system("python -c 'exit(42)'") >> 8 42 Read https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/os.html#os.system for the details. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list