exit-pipe 1.0.0

a command-line utility to pipe the exit code from a subprocess through one or more modifiers

exit-pipe

exit-pipe: a command-line utility to pipe the exit code from a subprocess through one or more modifiers.

Background

This utility executes a specified subprocess, captures its exit code, and exits with the result of piping the exit code through a conditional exit code modifier.

The motivation for this slightly obtuse solution was to work around limitations imposed by build utilities which execute configurable subprocesses without exposing full shell access (e.g. tox) while also maintaining reasonable portability across multiple operating system environments (thus eliminating the option of executing an explicit shell within tox).

As of this release, one style of exit code modifier pipeline exists: bitfield.

The bitfield exit code pipeline (activated via the --bitfield argument) evaluates the exit code against one or more bitfield masks and either replaces the exit code with the mapping specified by the first matching bitfield mask or passes through the unmodified exit code if no bitfield masks match.

Supported Platforms

This utility has been tested on macOS Catalina 10.15.

Usage

Development Environment

Initialize a development environment by executing tox; the exit-pipe utility will be installed in the .tox/py38 Python virtual environment binary path.

Examples

Remap non-fatal, non-error pylint exit codes to 0

As of pylint 2.4.3, the utility's exit code is a bitfield that may be decoded as:

Bit	Meaning
0	No error
1	Fatal message issued
2	Error message issued
4	Warning message issued
8	Refactor message issued
16	Convention message issued
32	Usage error

To remap the exit code for pylint src such that it exits with:

• 1 for fatal (1) and error (2) exit codes, and
• 0 for warning (4), refactor (8), convention (16), and usage (32) exit codes,

you may pass pylint through exit-pipe as follows:

exit-pipe --bitfield "3:1;60:0" -- pylint src

The equivalent bitfield masks may be specified individually as follows:

exit-pipe --bitfield "1,2:1;4,8,16,32:0" -- pylint src

As niche as this example may be, it serves as a generic workaround to cases where you may wish to log all pylint messages while only interpreting a few classes of messages as build errors. Disabling or ignoring classes of messages would result in them not being logged.