ontape exit status

Hi All, I am trying to prevent ontape's "Please mount ..." messages piling up in the log file. I also want to catch the exit status of ontape. I have tried to use the suggested solution to pipe the output through 'head', as follows (I'm using ksh) : echo '\\n\\n' | ontape ... | head -100 > mylog 2>&1 While this does kill ontape after 100 lines, the exit status of the pipeline is that of head, which is 0. My next iteration: { echo '\\n\\n' | ontape ... echo $? > ontape_stat_file # can't use var, this is a sub-shell } | head -100 > mylog wait read stat < ontape_stat_file