Official documentation for Windows command line is quite clear - return code is a bit mask, every bit means something and, particularly, code '256' means 'some issues were found in the source code'.
For the Linux command line operation I can get this help message wih pvs-studio-analyzer --help
pvs-studio-analyzer state codes that form a bit mask exit code are:
0 - Analysis was successfully completed, no issues
were found in the source code;
1 - Preprocessing failed on some file(s);
2 - Indicates that analyzer license will expire in
less than a month;
3 - Analysis was interrupted;
4 - Error (crash) during analysis of some source file(s);
5 - Indicates that analyzer license has expired;
6 - License expiration warning suppression flag was used
with non-expiring license;
First of all, these codes can not form a valid bit mask, they are not powers of 2!
Secondly, there is no specific return code meaning "some issues were found in the source code" in which I'm particularly interested - so there is no obvious way to check if any issues were found (and react to it somehow).
Thirdly, I could not find anything about return codes on Linux in official documentation.
So, my question is - is this help message correct? And if it is, how can I check if any issues were found?
The pvs-studio-analyzer utility for Linux and macOS really doesn't return a bit mask. We fixed the description.
To detect cases when there are warnings in the report, use the plog-converter utility:
plog-converter ... --indicate-warnings ...
-w, --indicate-warnings. Set this option to detect the presense of analyzer warnings after filtering analysis log by setting the converter exit code to '2'.