Not quite, see below.

Yes. This is what i'd expect.

I'd also expect some diagnostic message to be issued (i don't have OS X but i suppose it would be something along the lines of "Error: cannot ....") and the return-code to be non-zero. This is a common trait of UNIX-commands: whenenver they cannot do what is asked they will return a non-zero error code. Try the following:

Code:

ls -l /etc/hosts
echo RC is $?
ls -l /some/nonexisting/file
echo RC is $?

/etc/hosts is a file supposed to exist, so the return code should be zero, the second file does not exist, so the error code will be presumably 2 (if OS X-ls works the same way as my ls on AIX, the value might differ but it should be non-zero in any case).

I hope this helps.

bakunin