Shell Programming and Scripting

I am tarring up a directory and then deleting the contents. I get a message that the file changed as tar was reading it, then my script fails on an error.

tar: /workdir/SRD.out.20080216: file changed as we read it
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
tar command failed, nothing archived - RC=0... message from my script.

The return code appears to be zero, but my script is not catching it and fails at that point without getting to the statement to delete the files. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

if ls $WORKDIR/* >/dev/null 2>&1; then
tar cvf $ARCH/logs.tar $WORKDIR
else
echo "No files to Archive"; exit 0;
fi
if [ "$?" -ge 1 ]; then echo "tar command failed, nothing archived - RC=$?..."; exit $?; fi
rm -f $WORKDIR/*

Code:

$ cat bogus
#! /usr/bin/ksh

false
echo $?
echo $?


false
if [ $? -ge 1 ] ; then echo but now the code is $? ; fi
$ ./bogus
1
0
but now the code is 0
$

$? is not the exit status of the last command you care about. It is the exit status of the last command. If you do anything except a comment $? may change. The [ in the if statement is a command. You use [ to test the tar command's exit status, then you display the [ command's exit status. Always do stuff like:
tar_status=$?
immediately after the tar command and then test and display the saved version.