Hi Priya,
I think everyone is missing the point of your problem. Although they are correct in pointing out that the exit status of a function call is not the appropriate way to return multiple values computed by a shell function. When you later said that you had two shell scripts, what you wanted became more confusing because you didn't show us two shell scripts; you showed us one shell script that included a shell function.

When you call the function row, a, b, c, and d are set in the current shell execution environment. When you call that function in a command substitution (i.e., `row 2 3` or $(row 2 3)), you create a new shell execution environment and when you get back to the original shell execution environment (after assigning a value to the variable e, those settings have been lost. If you remove the echo from your function and call the function without using command substitution, I think you'll get what you want.

I modified your function to return non-zero (failure) if either of the operands you pass to it is zero and to return exit status 0 (success) if both operands are non-zero to demonstrate how the exit status can be used directly in an if statement or by calling the function and then using $? in the next statement to determine whether the function succeeded or failed. Try the following as a replacement for your script:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
row() {
        if [ "$1" -eq 0 ] || [ "$2" -eq 0 ]
        then    return 1
        fi
        a=$1
        b=$2
        c=$(($a + $b))
        d=$(($a * $b))
        # If we get to here, the exit status will be the exit status of the last
        # command above.  As long as the assignment to d succeeded, the exit
        # status of this function will be zero.  You could also explicitly put a
        # return 0 here, but that should not be needed in this case.
}
if row 11 0
then    echo 'row 11 0 succeeded'
        echo "The value of a is $a"
        echo "The value of b is $b"
        echo "The value of c is $c"
        echo "The value of d is $d"
else    echo 'row 11 0 failed'
fi
row 4 5
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then    echo 'row 4 5 succeeded'
        echo "The value of a is $a"
        echo "The value of b is $b"
        echo "The value of c is $c"
        echo "The value of d is $d"
else    echo 'row 4 5 failed'
fi

The output produced by this script is:

Code:

row 11 0 failed
row 4 5 succeeded
The value of a is 4
The value of b is 5
The value of c is 9
The value of d is 20

Hope this helps,
Don