Return value of salt-call is always zero

[Bernd Nigmann]

When I run salt-call, it always returns zero, regardless of the outcome of the executed states. Even when no state matches are found at all for the minion, it returns zero:

# salt-call -l quiet state.highstate ; echo $?

 

local:

----------

    State: - no

    Name:      states

    Function:  None

        Result:    False

        Comment:   No Top file or external nodes data matches found

        Changes:   

0

A few hours ago, on #Salt, "Smaragd_" had the same problem and "kuffs" mentioned he remembered an open bug around that. Neither Smaragd_ nor I could find it, though. Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

[Thomas S Hatch]

Hmm, salt-call does not make an explicit distinction as to whether a command fails or succeds if it executed and then returned then I have considered it success  This could also be seen as being highly subjective depending on the command. I am not aware of an open issue off the top of my head

[Bernd Nigmann]

Ah, that explains why I couldn't find one. That's okay, I can work around it by switching to raw or YAML output and parsing the "result" field of each of the execution blocks. Thanks, Thomas.

PS: It would've been nice if the return value for salt-call was non-zero if any of the nested "result" results was "false", as in

# salt-call -l quiet --yaml-out state.highstate

local:

  no_|-states_|-states_|-None:

    __run_num__: 0

    changes: {}

    comment: No Top file or external nodes data matches found

    name: No States

    result: false

[Thomas S Hatch]

I have been thinking about this, the trouble is that we would need to do this for all modules, and not all cases are easily defined as pass/fail. I am game for it though, since I think it is a killer idea, I just worry about the ability to execute in a consistent way....