Shell problem

Rex_chaos · 04-17-2002, 11:09 PM

I have written the following shell. First, the shell execute a program (client) which will return a exitcode. Then we have to check if the exitcode is 0. If so, reboot the computer.
The problem is that client is time-consuming program. So I want to let it run at background(./client &). However, I found the shell didn't wait the returned exitcode and jump to if statment soon.

# Run as root, of course
EXIT_CODE=0
./client

if [ $? -ne $EXIT_CODE ]
then
echo "Shell is terminated!"
exit -1
else
shutdown -r now
fi

zmedico · 04-17-2002, 11:29 PM

It makes no sense to me to fork a new thread (&) if you want to wait for the exit code. Maybe you can run your script, which includes the client followed by the part that checks for the exit code, in a single background thread.

xanthium · 04-19-2002, 02:13 AM

Hi Rex ,

After the (./client &) command did u try the wait command ?
it waits for the completion of the previous thread and so by using the $? shell metacharacter will be 0 if the the last background process ( in this case ur client&) was success.

i hope this is what u wanted ?

Regards,
Xanthium

Rex_chaos · 04-19-2002, 02:41 AM

Thanks. It works.