The MPI standard (page 295) says:

Advice to users. Whether the errorcode is returned from the executable or from the MPI process startup mechanism (e.g., mpiexec), is an aspect of quality of the MPI library but not mandatory.

Indeed I had no success in running the following code:

if(0 == my_rank)
{
   FILE* parameters = fopen("parameters.txt", "r");
   if(NULL == parameters)
   {
     fprintf(stderr, "Could not open parameters.txt file.\n");
     printf("Could not open parameters.txt file.\n");
     exit(EXIT_FAILURE); //Tried MPI_Abort() as well
   }
   fscanf(parameters, "%i %f %f %f", N, X_DIMENSION_Dp, Y_DIMENSION_Dp, HEIGHT_DIMENSION_Dp);
   fclose(generation_conf);
}

I am not able to get the error code back into the shell in order to make a decision on further actions. Neither of two error messages are printed. I think I might write the error codes and messages to a dedicated file.

Has anyone ever had a similar problem and what were the options you've considered to do a reliable error reporting?