why does close() fail miserably on popen with exit code -1 ?!

[Jeffrey Schwab]

Atanas Banov wrote:
> Jeffrey Schwab wrote:
> 
>>_PyPclose returns the exit status of the popened process (the popenee?),
>>or -1 on error.  Of course, if the status is supposed to be -1, there's
>>some confusion.
> 
> 
> yes, that's what i thought the root of the problem is.
> 
> 
>>In the snippet of code below (from Modules/posixmodule.c), result has
>>been initialized to the output of fclose, which in your case is 0.  The
>>comment is particularly handy.
>>
> 
> ....
> 
>>		/* Indicate failure - this will cause the file object
>>		 * to raise an I/O error and translate the last
>>		 * error code from errno.  We do have a problem with
>>		 * last errors that overlap the normal errno table,
>>		 * but that's a consistent problem with the file object.
>>		 */
> 
> 
> the piece you quoted is from the unix #ifdef part, i think. there is
> another version of the pypclose for windows below that.
> 
> in any event i think such behaviour is a bug - just because in unix
> exit codes are limited to 0..255 (and returned multiplied by 256)
> doesnt mean other OSes should suffer because of design flow in
> _PyPclose, right?
> 
> throwing an IOError "no error" doesnt help.
> 
> is there a bug database for python where i can check if this was
> discussed?

Yes, there's a bug database linked from python.org; search the main page 
for "Bugs".

Here's the most (seemingly) relevant bug report I can find:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=602245&group_id=5470&atid=105470