Printing the return value using 'echo $?' command
 

Hello everyone.
I've recently started using Linux (Ubuntu 8.10). My question is:

I've written a C program that simply returns 5 from main(). When I issue the echo $? command in the terminal, then as expected, it prints 5. But when I enclose the echo $? in a shell script file named ech.sh and then after running the C program, I issue:

$ ./ech.sh
It prints 0. ech.sh contains nothing but the echo $? command only.
Can anybody help me please?

Hi,

'$?' is a shell variable of the current shell. Your
script most likely starts with the line '#!/bin/sh'. That means that
commands within your script operate in a new shell with new shell
variables. The new shell inherits no environment variables from the
calling shell.

Typical workarounds are,

1. Call your script with an argument like 'myscript "$?"' and refer to that argument as '$1' in the script.

2. set an environment variable to "$?" before calling the script and export it as follows,

export RETURN_VALUE="$?" # NO SPACE between = and "$?".

then refer to $RETURN_VALUE in your script.

There are possibly other ways of doing this by selecting appropriate switches when calling the new shell.

Did you have something else in mind?