LTTng » LTTng-tools

The LTTNG (1) man page mentions that

On  success 0 is returned and a positive value on error. Value of 1 means a command error, 2 an undefined command, 3 a fatal error and 4 a command warning meaning that something went wrong during the command.

Any other value above 10, please refer to <lttng/lttng-error.h> for a detailed list or use lttng_strerror() to get a human readable string of the error code.

There are a number of things wrong with this. First of all, asking script authors to check some obscure error header deep in the bowels of their system is questionable, at best.

Second, as remarked by Michael Jeanson, Philippe Proulx, most command-line utilities don't return an error code to indicate a warning. A non-zero error code means an error as occurred.

We will have to go through commands and determine which errors are in fact harmless warnings (e.g. enabling the same event twice), and which ones shall signal an error (e.g. invalid channel configuration).