Field guide to command line failures · reference only, nothing hosted here
CliHelper

All entries

Twenty entries. Each one starts from the message a reader actually saw and works back to a cause.

permission denied
Exit code 13, and the variants that look like it.
command not found
Exit code 127, and the PATH problem behind it.
No such file or directory
Exit code 2, including the misleading CRLF case.
Killed
Exit code 137, and what actually consumed the memory.
Exit code 1
The catch-all failure, and how to stop guessing.
Segmentation fault
SIGSEGV from a shell script, and where to look.
Broken pipe
SIGPIPE when a pipeline consumer exits early.
certificate verify failed
TLS errors, and which hostname was actually checked.
Temporary failure in name resolution
Resolver problems versus a dead host.
Connection refused
Nothing is listening on that port.
Operation timed out
A silent host versus a filtered one.
No space left on device
ENOSPC and inode exhaustion.
Read-only file system
A mount that stopped accepting writes.
Text file busy
ETXTBSY when replacing a running binary.
Argument list too long
E2BIG from an oversized expansion.
Resource temporarily unavailable
EAGAIN and fork failures.
Docker exec fails
Container state and permission problems.
grep returns nothing
Why an empty result set is usually a quoting bug.
curl produces no output
The silent failure modes and how to surface them.
Could not get lock
Package manager contention on a shared host.

CliHelper documents failure modes of third-party command line tools. No software is stored or distributed here.

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