How can I negate the return-value of a process?

Question

I'm looking for a simple, but cross-platform negate-process that negates the value a process returns. It should map 0 to some value != 0 and any value != 0 to 0, i.e. the following command should return "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist":

 ls nonexistingpath | negate && echo "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist."

The ! - operator is great but unfortunately not shell-independent.

Answer 1

In Bash, use the ! operator before the command. For instance:

! ls nonexistingpath && echo "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist"

Answer 2

You could try:

ls nonexistingpath || echo "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist."

or just:

! ls nonexistingpath

Answer 3

! ls nonexistingpath && echo "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist."

or

ls nonexistingpath || echo "yes, nonexistingpath doesn't exist."

Answer 4

In a Bourne (Korn, POSIX, Bash) script, I use:

if ...command and arguments...
then : it succeeded
else : it failed
fi

This is as portable as it gets. The 'command and arguments' can be a pipeline or other compound sequence of commands.

The '!' operator, whether built-in to your shell or provided by the o/s, is not universally available. It isn't dreadfully hard to write, though - the code below dates back to at least 1991 (though I think I wrote a previous version even longer ago). I don't tend to use this in my scripts, though, because it is not reliably available.

/*
@(#)File:           $RCSfile: not.c,v $
@(#)Version:        $Revision: 4.2 $
@(#)Last changed:   $Date: 2005/06/22 19:44:07 $
@(#)Purpose:        Invert success/failure status of command
@(#)Author:         J Leffler
@(#)Copyright:      (C) JLSS 1991,1997,2005
*/

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include "stderr.h"

#ifndef lint
static const char sccs[] = "@(#)$Id: not.c,v 4.2 2005/06/22 19:44:07 jleffler Exp $";
#endif

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int             pid;
    int             corpse;
    int             status;

    err_setarg0(argv[0]);

    if (argc <= 1)
    {
            /* Nothing to execute. Nothing executed successfully. */
            /* Inverted exit condition is non-zero */
            exit(1);
    }

    if ((pid = fork()) < 0)
            err_syserr("failed to fork\n");

    if (pid == 0)
    {
            /* Child: execute command using PATH etc. */
            execvp(argv[1], &argv[1]);
            err_syserr("failed to execute command %s\n", argv[1]);
            /* NOTREACHED */
    }

    /* Parent */
    while ((corpse = wait(&status)) > 0)
    {
            if (corpse == pid)
            {
                    /* Status contains exit status of child. */
                    /* If exit status of child is zero, it succeeded, and we should
                       exit with a non-zero status */
                    /* If exit status of child is non-zero, if failed and we should
                       exit with zero status */
                    exit(status == 0);
                    /* NOTREACHED */
            }
    }

    /* Failed to receive notification of child's death -- assume it failed */
    return (0);
}

This returns 'success', the opposite of failure, when it fails to execute the command. We can debate whether the 'do nothing successfully' option was correct; maybe it should report an error when it isn't asked to do anything. The code in '"stderr.h"' provides simple error reporting facilities - I use it everywhere. Source code on request - see my profile page to contact me.