exit status

[svar]

I shell scripting what does the exit -1 means?

[countach44]

Who wrote the script? Meaning of non-zero exit is often attributed by the author.
Some standard definitions are usually located in errno.h
You can find this, e.g. at /usr/include/asm-generic/errno.h

Now, -1 is a special number because in two's complement binary representation it corresponds to all 1's (255 for an 8 bit integer)
I think it usually corresponds to "unknown error," though I may be totally mistaken.

If you're a C programmer, the "perror()" function will
print the traditional meaning of an error code for you and "strerror()" will return it as a string.

Here's some quick (not guaranteed to be perfect) example code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    int i;

    for(i=1;i<argc;i++)
        printf("%d: %s\n",atoi(argv[i]), strerror(atoi(argv[i])));
    return 0;
}

References:
`man errno`
http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/htm...it-Status.html

[svar]

sure, I dint write the script, I was going through the script and noticed exit -1 in the code and I am unable to figure it out how and what it does.. Still I am in confusion

[countach44]

Is the script in bash? Running it with "bash -x" will give more detail about what it's doing (you'll probably want to redirect output to less, e.g. bash -x script.sh | less).
If you can find a snippet of relevant code and post it, maybe someone here can help you out.