127 Return code from $?

Question

What is the meaning of return value 127 from $? in UNIX.

Answer 1

It has no special meaning, other than that the last process to exit did so with an exit status of 127.

However, it is also used by bash (assuming you're using bash as a shell) to tell you that the command you tried to execute couldn't be executed (i.e. it couldn't be found). It's unfortunately not immediately deducible though, if the process exited with status 127, or if it couldn't found.

EDIT:
Not immediately deducible, except for the output on the console, but this is stack overflow, so I assume you're doing this in a script.

Answer 2

Value 127 is returned by /bin/sh when the given command is is not found from PATH and it is not a builtin shell command.

Answer 3

A shell convention is that a successful executable should exit with the value 0. Anything else can be interpreted as a failure of some sort, on part of bash or the executable you that just ran. See also $PIPESTATUS and the EXIT STATUS section of the bash man page:

For the shell’s purposes, a command which exits with a zero exit status has succeeded. An exit status of zero indicates success. A non-zero exit status indicates failure. When a command terminates on a fatal signal N, bash uses the value of 128+N as the exit status.

   If  a command is not found, the child process created to execute it returns a status of 127.  If a com-
   mand is found but is not executable, the return status is 126.

   If a command fails because of an error during expansion or redirection, the exit status is greater than
   zero.

   Shell  builtin  commands  return  a  status of 0 (true) if successful, and non-zero (false) if an error
   occurs while they execute.  All builtins return an exit status of 2 to indicate incorrect usage.

   Bash itself returns the exit status of the last command executed, unless  a  syntax  error  occurs,  in
   which case it exits with a non-zero value.  See also the exit builtin command below.