Meaning of Exit Code 11 in C?

Question

What\'s the general meaning of an exit code 11 in C? I\'ve looked around and can not find a definitive answer so I thought I would ask here. It comes when i try to add an elemen

Answer 1

The other answers have missed a possible ambiguity in the phrase "exit code". I suspect what you meant by "exit code" is the status code retrieved with the wait family of syscalls, as in:

/* assume a child process has already been created */
int status;
wait(&status);
printf("exit code %d\n", status);

If you do something like that you may very will see "exit code 11" if the child process segfaults. If the child process actually called exit(11) you might see "exit code 2816" instead.

It would be better to call those things "wait code" or "wait status" instead of "exit code", to avoid confusion with the value passed to exit. A wait code contains several pieces of information packed together into a single integer. Normally, you should not look at the integer directly (like I did above in that printf). You should instead use the W* macros from <sys/wait.h> to analyze it.

Start with the WIF* macros to find out what kind of thing happened, then use that information to decide which other W* macros to use to get the details.

if(WIFEXITED(status)) {
  /* The child process exited normally */
  printf("Exit value %d\n", WEXITSTATUS(status));
} else if(WIFSIGNALED(status)) {
  /* The child process was killed by a signal. Note the use of strsignal
     to make the output human-readable. */
  printf("Killed by %s\n", strsignal(WTERMSIG(status)));
} else {
  /* ... you might want to handle "stopped" or "continued" events here */
}

Answer 2

You didn't find a definitive answer because there isn't one. It's up to the author of the program to decide what exit codes they wish to use. Standard C only says that exit(0) or exit(EXIT_SUCCESS) indicate that the program is successful, and that exit(EXIT_FAILURE) indicates an error of some kind. (Returning a value from main is equivalent to calling exit with that value.) Most common operating systems including Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. use 0 for success and values from 1 to 255 to indicate errors; still choosing between error codes is up to the application writer, the value 11 isn't anything special.

Under Linux and most other Unix variants, the signal number 11 indicates a segmentation fault, as remarked by Kerrek SB. A segmentation fault happens when a program makes some kind of invalid memory access, so it's a plausible consequence of accessing an array out of bounds, or an error in pointer arithmetic, or trying to access a null pointer, or other pointer-related errors. Signal 11 is not the same thing as exit code 11: when a program dies due to a signal, it's marked as having been killed by a signal, rather than having exited normally. Unix shells report signals by reporting an exit code which is the signal number plus 128, so 139 for a segmentation fault.

Answer 3

There is no standard defined which exit codes an application has to set in certain situations. It is totally up to the programmer which exit codes represent which error or even success !

Sometimes programmers decide that any value different from zero signals an error, and sometimes this value equals the operating systems error codes.

On Windows exit code 11 might be used because of problems with a file. If you want the description of this error code (which is specific to Windows and not necessarily your application) run net helpmsg 11.