Exit Code 0 Fooled This Scheduler for Five Days: Silent Success Is Worse Than Loud Failure
Glittering-Flan-2637 · reddit · 2026-09-14
A developer's scheduler reported "published" every 30 minutes for five days while outputting nothing, because the parent process checked only the worker's exit code—and zero means merely "didn't crash," not success. A worker refusing every item and exiting cleanly also returns zero.
The expensive part wasn't the bug but the success status line that discouraged anyone from investigating. The root cause: two components enforced one rule from different state—one read a log pruned by retention, the other a still-valid summary—so the parent said go while the worker refused. The fix: stop inferring outcomes from exit codes and read what the worker actually reported (items handled, and why it stopped when that count was zero).
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