[Info-vax] completion status from LIB$SPAWN

[Michael Moroney]

StGallen <sengupta.suhas at gmail.com> writes:

>So the question remains: why would VMS return 2 values for Normal Completion?
>How are programmers expected to handle it without going the route of the
>procedure posted by Briggs above.

That is the usual procedure.

If you only need a "worked/didn't work" status, just look at the low bit.
1=success, 0=failure.

If you need a higher level of detail of the failure (or success), look at
the low 3 bits.
0=warning,2=error,4=severe error.  1=success,3=informational (often an
alternate success, such as CREATE/DIRECTORY returning %X10911293 if the
directory already exists).

If you need the specific message/error, look at everything except the
highest 4 bits. Of the high bits, bit 28 is supposed to indicate that the
message was already printed, so you don't print duplicate messages.
DCL obeys this bit and won't print even a severe error with it set.