Failure to return a fail!

[SGGardiner]

I have a parent build script which calls a child script. It is the child which checks the source out of sourcesafe and builds a whole series of DLLs and Exes. If one of these operations fails, the failure steps are executed but it still returns a success to the parent.

The failure steps perform quite a bit of work, namely, resetting some macros, logging the fail message, transforming the xml log file to HTML, performing a subroutine to generate a number of other log files, zipping the HTML files, two undo checkout operations and finally emailing a build master!

My question really is that could the fact that all these steps are completed successfully in any way mean that a success is returned to the parent script?

Thoughts please

George