UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

can you tell me what value it will return by default?? after while loops finishes and comes out of the loop. Its huge code i am not sure whether it would be helpful posting here, Thank you.

It will return the exit code of the last command executed (as Corona688 said earlier).

If you are testing this return value as:

Code:

function

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  ....
else
  ....
fi

and the function returns a value other than zero, then the else part will be executed.

Put

Code:

set -x

at the top of your script to get some debug info.
(by top, I mean after the shebang on line 1)

The thing happening is after the while loops completes in script2 it is returning some nonzero value though there is no exit or return statement to return as such. I came to know from somebody that after while loop ends reading the file it has the tendency to return a random value to the script1. Which is causing issue but not sure how far is it true? Thank you.

Hi.

I very much doubt it's returning a "random" value.

If you need it to return zero (and / or you don't care about the return value), do one of two things:

Code:

. /apps/bin/script2

function

....
....
....