UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I am using ksh to write my shell script. I need to create multiple-level of nested sub shells in my script. Lets say I have at n th subshell. My question is how do I come out from there to main login shell.

If I use 'exit' command then it is exiting from just one subshell and back to (n-1) th subshell. But I want to come out all way to login shell.

Any idea, pointer, opinion would be highly appreciated.

Thanks
Rabi

There is no way to directly cause the parent shell to exit. The usual method is to invoke the subshell in such a way that the parent is told to exit if the subshell exits with an error. Perhaps you could use this construct. Why do you need so many levels of shell scripts anyway?

Code:

# run subscript, exit if it fails
subscript || exit $?

I am not trying to exit from parent shell. But I want to come back to main parent shell, i.e. from n th level to 1st level.

In each of the subshells, exit with a defined value:

(
# In subshell 5
........
........
exit 225 # exit with a defined value when you want to exit out of the program.
)

# In subshell4, check this exit value in the statement immediately where subshell5 ends.

[ "$?" -eq 225 ] && exit 224 # Similarly, subshell3 can check for this value and exit

And so on... till you reach your parent shell

By "parent", I mean the n-1 level shell, for any n