What "standard" application return/exit codes should an application support?

Question

Is there such thing as a standard set of application return codes? Things like returning 0 for success 1 for failure, and then so on?

I have a Windows Server application that I am adding some return error codes and wanted to stick to standard codes in addition to the app specific ones that I will need.

Answer 1

I think the only standard is 0 for success and non-zero for failure. And that's more of a convention than a standard.

Answer 2

Maybe you can adopt some of the Unix conventions.

In another answer, the user David suggested

sysexits.h has a list of standard exit codes. It seems to date back to at least 1993 and some big projects like Postfix use it, so I imagine it's the way to go.

From the OpenBSD man page:

According to style(9), it is not good practice to call exit(3) with arbi- trary values to indicate a failure condition when ending a program. In- stead, the pre-defined exit codes from sysexits should be used, so the caller of the process can get a rough estimation about the failure class without looking up the source code.

This is the list as it appears on a Debian system:

#define EX_USAGE        64      /* command line usage error */
#define EX_DATAERR      65      /* data format error */
#define EX_NOINPUT      66      /* cannot open input */    
#define EX_NOUSER       67      /* addressee unknown */    
#define EX_NOHOST       68      /* host name unknown */
#define EX_UNAVAILABLE  69      /* service unavailable */
#define EX_SOFTWARE     70      /* internal software error */
#define EX_OSERR        71      /* system error (e.g., can't fork) */
#define EX_OSFILE       72      /* critical OS file missing */
#define EX_CANTCREAT    73      /* can't create (user) output file */
#define EX_IOERR        74      /* input/output error */
#define EX_TEMPFAIL     75      /* temp failure; user is invited to retry */
#define EX_PROTOCOL     76      /* remote error in protocol */
#define EX_NOPERM       77      /* permission denied */
#define EX_CONFIG       78      /* configuration error */

Inside the file /usr/include/sysexits.h one can find more detailed descriptions of these error codes.