Exit codes and command line best practices

Ensuring proper exit codes and following best practices is essential for a seamless user experience. Exit codes provide a way for command-line applications to communicate their status to the calling application. A well-defined exit code system allows users and the other scripts to understand whether the application executed successfully or encountered an issue when running.

In Go, the os package provides a straightforward way to set exit codes using the ox.Exit function. Conventionally, an exit code of 0 indicates success, while any non-zero code signals an error.

For example, you can check the status code of the previous exercise and verify the successful status code. To do this, run echo $? in the terminal. $? Is a special shell variable that holds the exit status of the last command that was executed, and the echo command prints it out. You’ll see the 0 exit code printout denoting a successful execution status, and no error...