Currently pydoc returns an exit code of zero no matter what, even with e.g.

    pydoc lsjdfkdfj

However, the ability to know whether or not pydoc successfully found a result is useful in tools that embed pydoc in some way.

Here's one use case: Vim and Neovim have a feature that allows a user to run an external command for the keyword under the cursor (keywordprg). In Python files, this defaults to pydoc. In Neovim, we would like to automatically close the PTY buffers that we create for these processes when they finish without any errors, but if it returns a non-zero exit code we want to keep the PTY buffer open so the user can see what went wrong. Because pydoc returns immediately when it fails to find a match and does not indicate that it failed via a return code, the PTY buffer is closed immediately with no indication to the user that anything went wrong.

I have a patch prepared for this that I will link to the issue.

New changeset 8868d48712aee2b490efaf60bed8dfe9fb14d6b7 by Gregory Anders in branch 'main':
bpo-44967: pydoc: return non-zero exit code when query is not found (GH-27868)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/8868d48712aee2b490efaf60bed8dfe9fb14d6b7

Thanks for the report and fix, Gregory! ✨ 🍰 ✨