Hello,

I found this weird behavior of zsh, when using the version in Debian
stable. Version 4.2.5-7.

As I have no reason to suspect this is Debian specific, so I am
reporting it here.

I recently reported it to my local Linux mailing list just in case
anybody could explain it, but so far everyone appears to be stumped.

The full details are in the attached email.

Any ideas? Is this a zsh bug or a bug sitting at the console?

The same thing works with bash. I also tried zsh-beta
(4.3.0-dev-1+20050424-1) from Debian stable, and got similar
results. I suspect a zsh bug.

Its totally weird. Even the weird parts are weird. The parts that
aren't weird are also weird.

I have copied the screen output verbatim, I have not omitted anything
except for the hundreds of tests I conducted (repeat: press up arrow;
press enter). I didn't dare try to automate the process in case this
altered the results (the initial problem was in a zsh script though;
the entire script aborted for no good reason).

For the moment I have changed my executable (used by the script) to
return 1 instead of 255, and it works fine.

Is a return value of 255 treated specially by zsh?

Please CC responses to me, thanks.