why does close() fail miserably on popen with exit code -1 ?!

[Atanas Banov]

Jeffrey Schwab wrote:
> _PyPclose returns the exit status of the popened process (the popenee?),
> or -1 on error.  Of course, if the status is supposed to be -1, there's
> some confusion.

yes, that's what i thought the root of the problem is.

> In the snippet of code below (from Modules/posixmodule.c), result has
> been initialized to the output of fclose, which in your case is 0.  The
> comment is particularly handy.
>
...
> 		/* Indicate failure - this will cause the file object
> 		 * to raise an I/O error and translate the last
> 		 * error code from errno.  We do have a problem with
> 		 * last errors that overlap the normal errno table,
> 		 * but that's a consistent problem with the file object.
> 		 */

the piece you quoted is from the unix #ifdef part, i think. there is
another version of the pypclose for windows below that.

in any event i think such behaviour is a bug - just because in unix
exit codes are limited to 0..255 (and returned multiplied by 256)
doesnt mean other OSes should suffer because of design flow in
_PyPclose, right?

throwing an IOError "no error" doesnt help.

is there a bug database for python where i can check if this was
discussed?