Vmware RCLI and exit status

Yet another gripe about Vmware's RCLI commands: they almost always return an exit status of zero, even if the command failed. For example, 'vmware-cmd -s unregister' for a non-existent virtual machine, return a status of zero (which is the same as if the command succeeded). One has to look at the standard output of the command to see "No virtual machine found." This is OK for an interactive user, but it's a pain-in-the-ass if you're trying to write scripts, as I happen to be. For every command, I have to parse the output to see if it succeed or not.

But then some commands (e.g., vifs) do return useful exit codes, at least some of the time. This whole process has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Speaking of parsing output, the outputs are not consistent. For example, when that unregister command is successful, it returns "unregister() = 1". Note there is a space on both sides of the equals sign. When the corresponding register command succeeds, it returns "register() =1". Note that there is no space on the left side of the equal sign. As I write code to parse these outputs (because I can't count on the exit status), I can't help but wonder how brittle this code will be...


Charles.