[Geany-Users] PHP_Beautifier

[Lex Trotman]

[...]
>> Right, but Geany thinks that since it returned messages on stderr that
>> something went wrong with the command, so it doesn't do the
>> substitution.  You should have a message along the line "The executed
>> custom command returned an error. Your selection was not changed." in
>> the status bar.
>
> What's the point about it BTW?  Normally a command exit status should be
> the way to check, I don't see why we should make weird guess at a
> command not being allowed to output something on stderr?
>
>

Well, I don't know the original argument for doing it this way, but
I've got two:

1. the command is meant to be a filter, stdin to stdout, anything on
stderr almost certainly indicates a problem.

2. sadly there are still filters that return zero if they fail and
non-zero if they succeed (especially user written ones :), which means
that you can't just test the return value.

Cheers
Lex


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