[SOLVED] Exit status of a piped-background process...

acc_Wk · 09-12-2011, 06:25 AM

Hello I'm running into a problem while trying to collect the exit status of a command which is executed in background and which also is part of a piped set of commands..
For examples if 'a' and 'b' are commands, I'm running a | b &
And i need to get exit status of 'a'

My code snippet is shown below:

Code:

a.sh | tee -a $logfile &
wait $!
<now how do i get return status of a.sh>

PIPESTATUS[] didnt work and I also read in bash ref manual that it works only on foreground pipes... And doing $? after wait command is not returning me the status of a.sh.. I guess it would return exit-status of last command in pipe...

Any help is appreciated
Thanks for your time!!!

Reuti · 09-12-2011, 06:49 AM

It’s possible to catch the return code in a subshell:

Code:

(a.sh; echo $? > RETURN_CODE) | tee -a $logfile &

Then you can get the exit code from the created file.

acc_Wk · 09-12-2011, 09:26 AM

Thanks a lot !! That worked well!!