note
Dominus
I suppose it could do that, but the implementation is a bit difficult. The only way I can think of to do it reliably is to have the parent open a pipe to the child so that the child can communicate back the <tt>errno</tt> from the failed <tt>exec</tt>.<p>
And I would need to go over every possible value of <tt>errno</tt> and decide which ones warranted an early exit and which ones didn't. It seems like a complicated issue.<p>
Anyway, it's definitely a feature I haven't needed yet. A few years back I did a review of a couple of dozen programs I'd written and put in my <tt>~/bin</tt> directory, and the overwhelming majority of them were over-featurized, not under-featurized. I learned that I had wasted a lot of work on features I didn't need. So these days I try to leave out as many features as possible until I'm sure I need them.<p>
The original version of this program left <tt>-v</tt> unimplemented, but I kept wishing for it, so eventually I put it in. The original version of this program left <tt>-r</tt> unimplemented, but I haven't yet wished for it, so I haven't put it in yet. Win!<p>
It occurs to me now that if I <i>did</i> decide that I wanted the <tt>-r</tt> option, the right way to get it would be to write a separate <tt>shuffle</tt> utility that shuffles its arguments and prints them in random order. Then instead of <tt>runN -r ...</tt> I could <tt>runN `shuffle ...`</tt>. Win!<p>
Similarly, it has occurred to me more than once that the program completely fails to report the exit status of the subprocesses. Your suggestion is part of that. But I haven't needed to find out the exit status of the subprocesses, so I haven't tried to fix that.
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--<br><font size="-2">
<a href="mailto:mjd-www-perlmonks+@plover.com">Mark Dominus</a><br>
<a href="http://perl.plover.com">Perl Paraphernalia</a><br></font>
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