exitlie
Runs a command with its standard output failing (a full disk, a closed descriptor, a reader that went away) and says whether the exit status told the truth. Surveyed 55 programs on one machine.
- Year
- 2026
- Kind
- Systems · Rust
- Status
- Shipped
A program that exits 0 after its output went nowhere tells make, a shell && or a deploy script that the work succeeded. exitlie runs a command once normally, then under eight failure cells: stdout on /dev/full, fd 1 closed, a pipe with no reader, and write, fsync or close errors injected through strace. Fixed, ordered rules turn each result into a verdict.
On 55 installed programs on one Ubuntu 24.04 machine, 25 exited 0 after output was lost on a real failure, among them curl, tar, make and gcc. Every GNU coreutils program surveyed, and jq, grep and gzip, had none. Each lie on the results page comes with a one-line shell command that shows it without exitlie, and that command's real output.
The limits are written down. Most of the lies are in --version or --help output, so they are leads, not claims about a program's main path. Output dropped from a buffer that was never flushed looks like output never written. Each cell runs once, and the survey describes one machine.
