0001970: exit status unclear for iconv -c on invalid input

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0001970	1003.1(2013)/Issue7+TC1	Shell and Utilities	public	2026-01-22 07:39	2026-01-22 07:39

Reporter	stephane	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	Editorial	Type	Clarification Requested
Status	New	Resolution	Open

Name	Stephane Chazelas
Organization
User Reference
Section	iconv utility
Page Number	(page or range of pages)
Line Number	(Line or range of lines)
Interp Status
Final Accepted Text


Summary	0001970: exit status unclear for iconv -c on invalid input
Description	The iconv utility specification has: > The presence or absence of -c shall not affect the exit status of iconv. Which suggests that iconv should return the same exit status with -c that it should without. But the exit status section has: > >0 > An error occurred. Which seems to be in contradiction. AFAICT, both the iconv that comes with GNU libc and GNU libiconv exit with status 1 and no error message in: printf '\303\n' \| iconv -c -f UTF-8 For instance and the one from FreeBSD gives no error and exit with 0. I've not tested other implementations. BTW, all three implementations exit with 1 and report an error message when the decoding error is found at the end (like in printf '\303' \| iconv -c -f UTF-8), which seems to be in breach of the POSIX specification. Not sure whether that's intentional or not.
Desired Action	Maybe change the exit status section to: >0 An error occurred or would have occurred in the absence of -c.
Tags	No tags attached.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2026-01-22 07:39	stephane	New Issue