I have a shell script, which calls a load script to load a database. How can i handle errors in Unix(similar to 'error level' in Batch scripts)? I am trying to use 'mailx' to send a Success/failure message based on the error level returned by the load script.

I have already used an error log file to find out success or failure of the load script, but sometimes there will be some errors even though it does not create an error log file, so its not 100% accurate.

Thanks

In bash the return code of a prog is in $?. Usually exit status 0 = success and 1 = failure.

If we look in the manpage for grep we find:

Normally, exit status is 0 if selected lines are found and 1 otherwise. But the exit status is 2 if an error occurred, unless the -q or --quiet or --silent option is used and a selected line is found.


Based on that, an example of usage:

---------------------------
#!/bin/bash

/bin/grep search_string file

if [ $? -eq 1 ];then
echo "String not found."
fi
---------------------------

Hope that gets you on your way.
Kent

That worked thanks.