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[darfader]

Hi,

there are items in shell scripting like $# and $?

what are these items called please ?


tia,

 

[Salem]

The bash manual page lists them as

   Special Parameters
       The  shell  treats  several parameters specially.  These parameters may
       only be referenced; assignment to them is not allowed.
...
       #      Expands to the number of positional parameters in decimal.
       ?      Expands  to  the status of the most recently executed foreground
              pipeline.

 

[darfader]

ty Salem


so I can trap a value from a command, say sqlload... and test it

RESULT=$?

if [ $RESULT != 0 ]
then
echo "customer_details sqlload fails with $RESULT"
exit 1
fi

 

[Salem]

Yes, that's the way to do it.

I would imagine that fairly complex commands like 'sqlload' would have a number of exit status codes to describe reasons for failure.