Similarly python throws an exception, and I bet other languages have their own behaviors, but in case of C this is the only way (or at least it is the only non complicated way to do it).
When I read this article I thought it was preaching to a choir. I'm actually quite surprised people programming C don't check for errors. That's the only way the functions can provide a feedback.
Nothing in C forces the API designer to use -1 as "bad PID" in one place and as "the set of all PIDs" in another, however. Perl's undef isn't that different from returning, gosh, -2 or any other bloody number except -1 in C.
fork() returns pid_t type which is usually mapped to int32_t. For this type there's no equivalent of Perl's "undef", the -1 is standardized as an error in all system calls that return an integer.
As for the argument why not send -2 instead, well guess what? Other negative values also have a meaning. Negative values in kill send signal to a process group instead of a process.
It's not libc responsibility to predict all possible things the programmer can do. Also unlike perl, C doesn't have exceptions so it can't exactly quickly terminate on error showing what went wrong.
Imagine C throwing SIGSEGV every single time a function failed.
> As for the argument why not send -2 instead, well guess what? Other negative values also have a meaning. Negative values in kill send signal to a process group instead of a process.
That's the problem there. Kill takes an argument that's either a process id or a magic number or a different magic number or.... Those should be different functions, and the special cases like "kill all processes", "kill all processes in this group",... should be some kind of enumeration type. But it's C, so...
When I read this article I thought it was preaching to a choir. I'm actually quite surprised people programming C don't check for errors. That's the only way the functions can provide a feedback.