There are a lot of pieces here that don't quite seem to fit. I assume that when you say "the flavour is sun" you mean that you are running an old system from Sun Microsystems, Inc. If that is true, then you are running script1.sh, script2.sh, and script3.sh with an old Bourne shell; not with bash.

Assuming that this script is being run by bash or ksh (or some other shell that includes POSIX standard arithmetic substitutions; which does not include /bin/sh on Solaris 10 systems), the following untested code might do what you want:

Code:

[ -f status ] || date '+0 %c' > status

read job datestamp < status

if [ $job -eq 0 ]
then	if sh -x script1.sh > script1.log
	then	job=$((job + 1))
		date "+$job %c" > status
	else	echo "Failed due to some reason"
		exit 1
	fi
fi

if [ $job -eq 1 ]
then	if sh -x script2.sh > script2.log
	then	job=$((job + 1))
		date "+$job %c" > status
	else	echo "Failed due to some reason"
		exit 2
	fi
fi

if sh -x script3.sh > script3.log
then	job=0
	date "+$job %c" > status
else	echo "Failed due to some reason"
	exit 3
fi

although it is totally untested. It assumes that you always run this script in the same directory and uses a file named status in that directory to keep track of the last job that was successfully completed (and when that job last completed successfully).

I hope this gives you some idea of how you could approach this problem and gives you something you can modify to get what you want to work in your environment.