running groovy.bat does not return exit status on windows

can you please test "exit /b %ERROR_LEVEL%" ?

I already did, I just forgot to include a comment about that in the bug report. Sorry.
It does not work, either.

I also tried both spellings ERROR_LEVEL and ERRORLEVEL. The first should be correct (as it works when using exit %ERROR_LEVEL%), but the latter form appears in the documentation you get by typing
exit /?

I inspected other Java apps that start via .bat files and noticed that at least ajc (the aspectj compiler, www.eclipse.org/aspectj) does manage to return the correct exit code:

C:\Temp>groovy -e "def p='ajc.bat'.execute();def t=p.err.text;p.waitFor();println p.exitValue()"
-1

// had to read the messages in the err stream, otherwise p.waitFor() does not return

I looked at ajc.bat and noticed that running the Java class is on the last line. I experimented a little and noticed this also works w/ groovy.bat. This is quite fragile - the lines after running the Java class may contain only whitespace - not even comments.

To emphasize: the return code is correct if the last line of the groovy.bat is
"%JAVA_EXE%" %JAVA_OPTS% -classpath "%CP%" %CLASSWORLDS_MAIN_CLASS% groovy %CMD_LINE_ARGS%

I hope this is of some help.

Is it still the case that the return value is not correct?

Yes, the return value is still always 0. I think the importance of this is now quite small as the native launcher behaves correctly and is included in the windows installer (which I would believe most windows users will use).

A weird thing though is that

groovy -e "p='groovy.bat -e \"System.exit(1)\"'.execute();p.waitFor();println p.exitValue()"

does not work any more. It prints "255", but it seems that the problem is that groovy.bat (that is invoked in the one-liner) is not executed at all for some reason.

The ruby version of the test works fine:

C:\Documents and Settings\nak>ruby -e "system('groovy.bat -e \"System.exit(1)\"');print $?>>8"
0
C:\Documents and Settings\nak>ruby -e "system('groovy.exe -e \"System.exit(1)\"');print $?>>8"
1

This is still a problem, but it can be fixed by using this as the last line in both groovy.bat and startGroovy.bat

CMD /C EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

(copied from mvn.bat)

any chance this can still be fixed in 1.6-RC ?

as last line you mean inclusive the CMD /C? that could prevent one or two problems if the bat file is called with command.com instead of cmd.exe

Yes, the full line, including CMD /C.

In 1.5.7, the same problem existed, but you could fix it by adding this line to only groovy.bat.

In Maven, the 'CMD /C' was added in MNG-3651. Not sure what problem it fixes.

And for command.com, I hadn't heard about that since my Win98 days

For portability you can do %COMSPEC% /c instead of CMD /c (this is what we've done for jython.bat)

Sorry, very new to this project. Any reason not to submit a patch for this? I am running 1.8.0 and still have the problem – I added this to my gant.bat and startGroovy.bat scripts as suggested and this fixed it.

@rem Fix the problem that Gant does not return correct error code as documented in
@rem http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-1034
cmd /C exit /B %ERRORLEVEL%

I added the following to all .bat files and it seemed to work for me in various tests:
%COMSPEC% /C exit /B %ERRORLEVEL%