Shell Programming and Scripting

Originally Posted by Corona688

This is really the preferred way to do it -- from the outside. Complicated schemes with pipes, tees, and fifos are liable to break down, subject to deadlocks, and can make your script dependent on a terminal: Untrustworthy and not worth the trouble. Even 99% success is not good enough. Putting in pipes also messes up the ordering, increases overhead manyfold, and can screw up your terminal prompt afterwards.

When redirecting it from the outside through tee, since you are using BASH, just check the script's return status in PIPESTATUS:

Code:

$ true | false | true | false
$ echo "${PIPESTATUS[0]} ${PIPESTATUS[1]} ${PIPESTATUS[2]} ${PIPESTATUS[3]}"
0 1 0 1

$

Code:

command 2>&1 | tee -a logfile
if [[ "${PIPESTATUS[0]}" -ne 0 ]]
then
        echo "command had an error"
fi

PIPESTATUS is even updated for a single command, so ${PIPESTATUS[0]} remains safe either way, as long as you're using BASH.