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I have a command such that

bar > /dev/null

and I want to know the exit status of bar. I read some posts su about ${PIPESTATUS[0]} but this works when one pipes the output via | and I can't make it work with > instead.

What am I missing?

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From the same question you have referred, you could try false > /dev/null and see that only ${PIPESTATUS[0]} has a value and ${PIPESTATUS[1]} is null which says the entire bar > /dev/null is a single command with no pipe involved. –  Ramesh Jan 7 at 1:57

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

> isn't a command. This means that bar will be the last command executed. You can check for failure with a standard if statement:

if ! bar > /dev/null; then
    echo "bar command failed"
fi

You can also access it's return code with $? if you are interested in something more than zero or non-zero:

bar > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 45 ]; then
  echo "bar returned exit code 45"
fi
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"> isn't a command. This means that bar will be the last command executed." That is a strange way to describe it. You can have >/dev/null before the last command in a pipeline. That can even make sense. The point is that > doesn't create a pipeline. –  Hauke Laging Jan 7 at 2:05

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