About

About ExitCode

A free, no-sign-up decoder that turns a cryptic exit status into a plain answer: what killed the process, why, and what to do about it.

Exit statuses are terse by design. A container dies with 137, a script returns 127, a binary crashes with 139 — each is a single number with no explanation attached. The Unix convention is that a process killed by signal N exits with 128 + N, so the codes you see most in logs are really signals in disguise: 137 is SIGKILL (often the out-of-memory killer), 143 is SIGTERM (a graceful stop), 130 is SIGINT (Ctrl-C). ExitCode does that arithmetic, names the signal, and explains the usual cause.

What it covers

Three contexts, because the same number can mean different things: Process / shell (POSIX exit codes and 128+signal), Docker & Kubernetes (adds 125 for a failed docker run and the OOMKilled reading of 137), and curl (its own ~30 transfer error codes, where 7 is "couldn't connect" and 60 is a TLS certificate problem).

What it is not

It is a reference lookup, not a diagnosis. The exit code narrows things down; the real cause lives in the program’s own logs, the kernel ring buffer (dmesg), or your orchestrator’s events. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent or stored.