Andrew, you are right. My excuse is that my dog ate the single quotes. ;-)) It was meant to be sudo echo '$PATH', but you are equally right about sudo -i.

This observation is correct but the return code being returned will be that of echo, no? To be honest i have never seen this command reurn anything else than TRUE. I would have a hard time even conceiving a situation where it fails. But you probably want to base the return code not on the success ot the echo but on the success of cleaning the logs.

It makes sense to base the return code of scripts on the success (or lack of it) of certain critical commands. The way to do that is like this: suppose your script will have - at its core - to execute three commands: command1, command2 and command3 in that order. Now, each of these commands could fail and you want to be able to find out how your script has failed - has it failed to execute command1? Or command2 or command3? So let us say you want to exit your script with:

0 when it succeeds (that is: all three commands excuted successfully);
1 when excuting command1 failed (the others are skipped in that case);
2 when excuting command2 failed (the last is skipped in that case);
3 when excuting command3 failed;

The logic to implement that is like this:

Code:

#! /bin/bash
if ! command1 ; then
     exit 1
fi
if ! command2 ; then
     exit 2
fi
if ! command3 ; then
     exit 3
fi
exit 0

The if executes any command and branches based on the return code of that command "!" is just a logical NOT and means branch if the command returns a non-zero (=logical FALSE) return code. Note that it doesn't matter exactly how the commands fail - they could have all sorts of error codes. This is why this is only the most basic form of logging, but since you do understand now the principle i am sure you can come up with more elaborate solutions should you need them.

Dear brother of the church of ongoing simplification, you surely noticed by now that you wasted four (!!) perfectly usable keystrokes with your solution too, no? This:

Code:

> messages
> wtmp

is even simpler than the much simpler solution. ;-))

I hope this helps.

bakunin