Re: dbaccess fail status to Bourne shell exit status

Steve AFAIK, the OOPS is because dbaccess finds the TERM setting incorrect and cannot render on the physical terminal given the settings of the existing TERM. Not to nitpick at your solution, but you could also try: dbaccess database_name /your/sql/script/somewhere/something.sql 2>/tmp/sql.log if [ `grep -ci "error" /tmp/sql.log` -gt 0 ]; then echo "An error has occured." cat /tmp/sql.log else echo "Successfull" fi This will give you output that you will be able to control (in terms of OOPS occurences :-)). HTH Sujit steve_roach@NOSPAMibm.net (Stephen Roach) on 04/23/99 04:54:22 PM Please respond to steve_roach@NOSPAMibm.net To: informix-list@iiug.org cc: (bcc: Sujit Pal) Subject: Re: dbaccess fail status to Bourne shell exit status On Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:19:56 GMT, roach@NOSPAMportalinc.com (Stephen Roach) wrote: > Hi folks > > I want to invoke dbaccess through a Unix script and drop a table. If > the table does not exist, I want the Unix script to report this using > $?. dbaccess just executes a sql file with a single drop statement. > Any ideas? > > TIA > > Steve Thanks for the replies, good people. They helped a lot. This is the solution I eventually implemented, warts and all: My table drop script exists in another part of the file system than the unix script used to invoke it. The unix script is only supposed to help with maintenance of the database and I don't want to mess with the other elements. The script now reads: dbaccess <database name> -qcr <drop script path>/$1 > status.out 2> /dev/null if grep "TableOOPSdropped." ./status.out > /dev/null then echo "Table dropped." ... else echo "Drop failed." ... fi If I don't redirect standard error to null, status.out containes a lot of control characters and the grep fails. dbaccess seems to be apologising for itself rather a lot because in the non-control char version of status.out, the characters OOPS appears all over the place, including between the words of and messages. Someone suggested [ -n `grep "Table dropped" status.out` ] as the test but I can't seem to get this to work (even with adding the OOPS!). Like I said, this solution has warts and I don't fully understand why some of the effects described above occur. However, this does the job and that's all I need right now. It also has the advantage of being able to test for any message condition assuming the right form and OOPS' are included in the test. I guess the alternative would be to test for the error number but I am a bit worried that the output may throw up a number out of context. Thanks for all your help. --------------------------------------------------------- Steve Roach: Remove NOSPAM from address to reply: steve_roach@NOSPAMibm.net steve_roach@NOSPAMhotmail.com