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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.13-tim i686; Nav) Description of problem: In some cases, when rpm 4.0.2 prints a verbose error message, it returns exit status 0, which causes programs like make to assume that it succeeded when it did not. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Here's how I can reproduce the problem on my system. Comments added afterward are in >>><<<'s. [tim@fungible ~]$ rpm --target RPM version 4.0.2 Copyright (C) 1998-2000 - Red Hat, Inc. This program may be freely redistributed under the terms of the GNU GPL Usage: rpm {--help} rpm {--version} >>>Blah, blah, blah<<< rpm {--rebuilddb} [--rcfile <file>] [--dbpath <dir>] rpm {--querytags} [tim@fungible ~]$ echo $status 0 >>>Should have been nonzero<<< [tim@fungible ~]$ rpm --version RPM version 4.0.2 [tim@fungible ~]$ uname -a Linux fungible.com 2.2.13-tim #13 Sat Apr 8 10:30:17 PDT 2000 i686 unknown Actual Results: Exit status 0 Expected Results: Any other exit status. Additional info: Trivial bug, but also probably a trivial fix, so probably worth doing.
The exit status of rpm has always been the number of failed operations/objects, not a boolean "bad operation" like many programs return. In addition, --target is not actually known to the /bin/rpm executable, it's a configurable popt alias that execs /usr/bin/rpmbuild. That executable returns a non-zero exit status: bash$ rpmbuild --target || echo yeah --target: missing argument yeah In fact, it looks like you have not installed the rpm-build package