Why does zsh hide error output from a c program?

Question

I have a program written in C that fails. When I run it in zsh, the program fails, but it's error output is not displayed in command line (note that the second ➜ was red, indicating a failed execution):

hpsc-hw2-USER on  master 
➜ ./sort -a 405500

hpsc-hw2-USER on  master 
➜ 

However, when I run it in bash, the error shows up:

[USER@COMPUTER hpsc-hw2-USER]$ ./sort -a 405500
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Any idea why? I'm running oh-my-zsh with the spaceship theme if that helps.

Answer 1

Any ideas how to make zsh output the error message?

The result of the last command is stored in the shell variable ?, so you can print it with something like print $? or echo $?. Like most shells, zsh is incredibly configurable, so you can write a script that e.g. includes the result of the last command in your prompt. Here's a blog post in which the author configures zsh to display non-zero results in the right prompt: Show Exit Code of Last Command in Zsh.

Or why it doesn't do it to begin with?

Shell commands don't normally crash, and if they encounter errors they typically provide more useful output than just the return code on their own. The return code is most useful for scripts, so that you can write a script that handle error conditions.