Get Return Value 1

[Michael42]

I obviously have a big hole in my UNIX knowledge on this one.

In a Bourne shell script I want to ping a hostname to see if it is there. I know I can do it this way:

STATUS=`ping $HOSTNAME`
echo $STATUS

...and then grep for "alive" etc.

I cannot find\remmeber how to get the return value. I want to use it like this:

ping $HOSTNAME
if [ <what goes here> -ne 0 ];
   echo "Host not available."
fi

What is the character that I need that will have the return value of ping?

Thanks,

Michael42

 

[Salem]

if [ $? -ne 0 ];

--

 

[Michael42]

Salem,

Perfect - thanks very much for posting.

-Michael42

 

[p5wizard]

If you just need the exit status, and code your if/then/else/fi construct around that status, usually you don't want the output of the "test" program:

ping $HOSTNAME >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo host $HOSTNAME is reachable
else
echo host $HOSTNAME is not reachable
fi


HTH,

p5wizard