LinuxQuestions.org - grep output of command to return 1 or 0 for if then statement

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grep output of command to return 1 or 0 for if then statement

So, I'm new here. Was thrown into the deepend (read: shallow pool) of linux administration of a few centos 6.5 servers in October, and I've been pretty slow on the uptake. Years of Windows administration and desktop support will do that I guess.

So we have qmail on our prod servers that send out messages for our webapps. Postfix failed last night on a prod server, and it occurred to me that it's happened a few times since I've started, and instead of waiting for clients to tell us, I should be more proactive. I came up with/begged/borrowed/stole a quick script to check to see if postscript was running, and if it was, restart it, and contact us. This was to be run from jenkins.

Quote:

if (( $(ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep postfix | wc -l) > 0 ))
then echo 'Mail is up.'
else echo 'Mail is down! Attempting to restart service...'
service postfix restart
fi

The question was then raised about an unresponsive process (zombies!), and I figured it might be a better idea to use postqueue -q, or mailq to either see a Mailbox is empty, or look for fatal if postfix is off or unresponsive. This is where I ran out of coffee and went over the deep end.

To get this to work, I thought it would be a good idea to run two scripts. One to check if the mail queue is empty, and if not, send up a flag. The next was to run a few minutes later to check and see if the mail queue was throwing up a fatal error, and if it was, throw up a second flag, which sent out an email from jenkins. Incidentally, if the mailqueue were clogged, this would also trigger an alert. Our mailqueue doesn't get a lot of traffic.

First command. Returns then and else statement without issue.

Quote:

if ((mailq | grep 'empty') < 0 ); then echo 'Mail is up.'; else echo 'Mail queue is not empty. Please check mail server'; fi

Second one... Not so much.

Quote:

if (mailq | grep 'fatal') < 1; then echo 'Mail is up.'; else echo 'Mail queue is not empty. Please check mail server'; fi

You can probably suss out what I'm trying to do here, even though I'm not doing it right. Any ideas? I know this is newbie stuff, and I appreciate your taking the time to read this people.

It looks you're trying to run a if statement based on whether grep fails or suceeds.
Remember, a successful command will output a error code of 0
If it fails, sometimes 1, or other various codes based on the error.
You can view the error code of the previous command with $?

So to test if mailq output has the string 'empty' in it:

Code:

if [ "$(mailq | grep 'empty' &>/dev/null; echo $?)" == 0 ]; then echo success; else echo failure; fi

Notice with your example, if it contains fatal, it will suceed. I am presuming if the string contains 'fatal' in it, the mail server is actually down?

Code:

if [ "$(mailq | grep 'fatal' &>/dev/null; echo $?)" != 0 ]; then echo 'Mail is up.'; else echo 'Mail queue is not empty. Please check mail server'; fi

Here is the string contains fatal in it, it will ouput a 0, which we take to mean the server is down. If it doesn't output a fatal, it will ouput a 1, so we know the server is up.

This is not the only way to do it of course.

In your second example, replace your single paren.s with doubles. ((<exp>)) is NOT the same as (<exp>).

Or we could just let 'if' do the heavy lifting:

Code:

if mailq | grep -q 'fatal'

then

  <your stuff here>

else

  <your other stuff>

fi

Miati, thank you not only for your help, but teaching me something new! Had no idea you could use echo $? for that. PTrenholme, grail, thanks for replying!

Quote:

Originally Posted by cojafoji (Post 5305037)

Miati, thank you not only for your help, but teaching me something new! Had no idea you could use echo $? for that. PTrenholme, grail, thanks for replying!

I'm glad it helped, but I greatly suggest you do something to help you be able to use bash more effectively.

Read the man page of bash (yes - RTM)
There is a abundant amount of information that is very useful when writing bash scripts
and just using bash in general. Reading over the sections I listed below will save you months
of browsing the web for why does n do this. I use most of the below daily (or even by the minute)
You can use / to search within man pages & lowercase n to go next in search (N previous)
Some things I greatly suggest examining is

Pipelines
Lists
Quoting
Special Parameters
Command Substitution
REDIRECTION
FUNCTIONS
CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS (if, while, for)

If any of it is confusing, feel free to ask for clarification.
I also always suggest this as well