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1

I have a bash file with commands to merge pcap files. I want to know if there is anyway to make sure a line in bash runs or not. Like in windows bat file we have %ErrorLevel% ¨ Say a command

touch -r dcn_file "${dir_dcn}"/"${TAG1_dcn}".pcap

How do I make sure this was run?

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3  
you can use echo $? which is the return value of the last command executed –  Kiwy 2 days ago
1  
You can also use set -e to make bash exit on failure automatically. You can also assign additional code using trap to be executed in case of error (or just at the end regardless of errors) –  Vi. 2 days ago
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2 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Shells are built to do that sort of thing easily.

if touch -r dcn_file "${dir_dcn}"/"${TAG1_dcn}".pcap 
then
    echo "Command ran successfully."
else
    echo "Command had an error: $?"
fi

You will occasionally find some proprietary command that doesn't exit with 0 status on success and non-zero on failure, but thankfully, those abberations have almost gone extinct.

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1  
Except for grep and its variants, where 0 indicates match found, 1 indicates match not found ("failure"?), and codes higher than 2 indicate error. –  WinnieNicklaus 2 days ago
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up vote 9 down vote

The bash variable $? hold the exit status of the last command run. For typical programs, the value 0 is success and any other value is failure. Specific return code should be documented in the man pages of the programs in question.

You can use code like:

touch -r dcn_file "${dir_dcn}"/"${TAG1_dcn}".pcap
[ $? -ne 0 ]; then
   echo "Command failed: touch: $?"
   return $?
fi

To test the return code and then print an error message and have a script exit with the same error code.

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As I read some documentation about nice this morning, the command could return the value of niceness of the process instead of 0 on old version –  Kiwy 2 days ago
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