Exit status of onstat
Hi family,
I have been seeing lots opf bashing of informix tools because the exit
status of the various programs does not follow conventions that help
shell scripts recover from errors.
I recently found the following shell script at my site. It is called at
the beginning of a night job that operates more efficiently in quiescent
mode.
========================= CUT HERE ========================
$ cat /usr/local/bin/engine
:
onstat - 1>/dev/null 2>&1
stat=$?
if test $stat -eq 1then
echo "Quiescent"
exit 1
fi
if test $stat -eq 5
then
echo "Online"
exit 5
fi
if test $stat -eq 255
then
echo "Offline"
exit 255
fi
========================= CUT HERE ========================
Criticisms of the shell script aside (whatsamatta? Ya neveh hueid of
case statements?), this appears to be depending on a quirk that someone
happened upon: The exit code of onstat is a different value depending on
the state of the OnLine system.
Is this documented anywhere? I don't see any mention of this in the
OnLine Admin Guide and I'm really leery about basing a whole cron job
operation on this oscure quirk. I would have preferred the knowing
comfort of a shell/awk/perl script that scans the heading lines of the
onstat output.
Thanks.
--
-- Jake (In pursuit of Brooklynese semi-aquatic avians)
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