Comment by OnlineTux
2 days ago
The question you are asking when querying a process exit code is "did this program exit with an error?". The default assumption is "no, it completed successfully", so 0 (false) is the logical expected default return.
A function is expected to produce a result - so the question is "what was the result?". !0 (something) is the logical expected default return.
I've never found it to be contradictory.
But in shell, 0 is true, not false. The program called true returns 0.
"True has 0 errors" is the straightforward part.
"False pretends to have an error" is where it gets weird. It's not that they got booleans backwards, it's that they're stretching a tenuous analogy a bit too far.