If you want to know right away that an error occurred while running your script, watch your script run. Using e-mail to be notified of time-critical events is strange. (There is no guarantee that an e-mail message will be delivered in any particular bounded time.) And the messages you're sending indicate that something went wrong, but you don't include the exit code and you don't include any diagnostic messages produced by any failing commands; so you know something went wrong, but you have no idea what the failing command told you when it failed. So, if anything goes wrong, you are throwing away most of the information that would help you figure out what needs to be fixed unless you are watching the script run (in which case, the e-mail gives you late notice of what you already know). And, assuming that most of your archiving activities complete successfully, you also get an urgent e-mail saying that each archival succeeded. After you've run this a few times, will you really notice an e-mail saying a project archival failed when you're used to seeing an e-mail saying a project archival succeeded?

With all of the things a sys admin has to do every day, is failing to archive a completed project high on the list of things that have to be addressed immediately?

The code I suggested gave you a single e-mail with all of the diagnostics produced by any failing commands as well as your failure and success notes. Your code gives you one e-mail containing a single line failure or success note for each attempted archival (throwing away any diagnostics produced by failing commands).

Obviously, you can do what you want to do here. If I were administering attempts to archive projects, I know which I would prefer.

- Don

PS You might also consider consolidating your remove commands:

Code:

rm -f "$SaveDir".tar
     and
rm -rf "$SaveDir"

into the single command:

Code:

rm -rf "$DIR" "$DIR.tar"

If you successfully tar a project's files and successfully rsync that archive to your archive server, is there any reason not to try to remove the project's files even if the attempt to remove the tar archive failed?