How to check the exit status using an ‘if’ statement

by

Every command that runs has an exit status.

That check is looking at the exit status of the command that finished most recently before that line runs.

If you want your script to exit when that test returns true (the previous command failed) then you put exit 1 (or whatever) inside that if block after the echo.

That being said, if you are running the command and are wanting to test its output, using the following is often more straightforward.

if some_command; then
    echo command returned true
else
    echo command returned some error
fi

Or to turn that around use ! for negation

if ! some_command; then
    echo command returned some error
else
    echo command returned true
fi

Note though that neither of those cares what the error code is. If you know you only care about a specific error code then you need to check $? manually.

More Related Contents:

  1. Pipe output and capture exit status in Bash
  2. Test for non-zero length string in Bash: [ -n “$var” ] or [ “$var” ]
  3. Automatic exit from Bash shell script on error [duplicate]
  4. Is there a TRY CATCH command in Bash
  5. Bash conditional based on exit code of command
  6. Validate date format in a shell script
  7. Ignoring specific errors in a shell script
  8. Expansion of variables inside single quotes in a command in Bash
  9. Can a shell script set environment variables of the calling shell? [duplicate]
  10. How to add a progress bar to a shell script?
  11. sudo echo “something” >> /etc/privilegedFile doesn’t work [duplicate]
  12. Is there a list of ‘if’ switches anywhere?
  13. Convert absolute path into relative path given a current directory using Bash
  14. While-loop subshell dilemma in Bash
  15. How do I escape the wildcard/asterisk character in bash?
  16. Check existence of input argument in a Bash shell script
  17. How do I grab an INI value within a shell script?
  18. How to create a cron job using Bash automatically without the interactive editor?
  19. Compound ‘if’ statements with multiple expressions in Bash
  20. How do I redirect output to a variable in shell? [duplicate]
  21. What do $? $0 $1 $2 mean in shell script? [duplicate]
  22. Division in script and floating-point
  23. How to remove filename prefix with a Posix shell
  24. How to pipe multiple commands into a single command in the shell? (sh, bash, …)
  25. How do I read user input into a variable in Bash?
  26. Why do I get “/bin/sh: Argument list too long” when passing quoted arguments?
  27. Count number of lines in a git repository
  28. shell script respond to keypress
  29. How to properly nest Bash backticks
  30. Subtract two variables in Bash

Leave a Comment