ANONYMOUS wrote:

After going through multiple years of forums, I believe I found an answer to this specific question here: https://secure.csse.uwa.edu.au/run/help2002?p=np&opt=U215&year=2019

Thanks for the link. However, unless I'm misinterpreting it, that thread ended unresolved too. Dr. McDonald's only contribution in that thread was a non-answer (below):

Will it? In all cases? There are no trick questions in the tests.

All the other messages seem to be speculation, where the same arguments are made (what if fork() doesn't work). As far as I can tell, the only new information from that thread is that Dr. McDonald doesn't view it as a trick question. While it is interesting that it means it's not a mistake, he doesn't elaborate on it at all or provide any indication about what the question is supposed to be testing, so my point still stands that there is no available explanation.

You also note that the question has similar phrasing to questions 8, 10, and 13 - this is not entirely true, as those questions specifically mention that the code is a function and question 20 just calls it "C code" (which is only a slight distinction, but still somewhat relevant).

I'm not sure how meaningful this distinction is. The "code" that is talked about being executed is the function body. There is no other code in the question. Perhaps the argument could be made in a language like Python, the "code" could be "executed" in the sense that it is processed by the interpreter but the function is not necessarily called, but in C this is handled at compile time so it doesn't really apply. I think it's an uncontroversial statement that any reasonable reader would expect "the code executes successfully" to mean "the code in the body of the function executes successfully".