Which of the following is the correct value returned to the operating system…

Answer: 0 is the correct value returned to the operating system upon successful completion.

Explanation: By convention on Unix-like systems and in many programming languages (for example, C and C++), an exit status of 0 indicates success. The operating system treats 0 as success and any nonzero value as an indication of an error or abnormal termination.

• Common examples: In C, use return 0; or exit(0); to signal successful completion. In the shell, the special variable $? holds the command exit status, where 0 means success.

• Nonzero values (for example, 1) indicate errors. Programs may use different nonzero codes to represent different error conditions.

• Negative values are not a standard success indicator: even if a language accepts an int, the OS typically interprets the exit status modulo 256 (0–255), so a negative value may be converted to a large unsigned value and thus signal failure.

• If a program does not explicitly return an exit code, the runtime or language standard often provides a default (commonly 0 for successful termination). However, the operating system still receives an exit status.

Therefore, the correct value indicating successful completion is 0.