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From: ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Return values in pipelines
Message-ID: <1990Aug22.211057.19850@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 90 21:10:57 GMT
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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 The /bin/sh (and the ksh) set the parameter ? to the return value of
 the last excuted command.  When I use a number of piped commands, say

prog1 | prog2 | prog3  ,

$? is set to the return value of the last command in the pipeline
(prog3) .  How can I detect if something went wrong on the previous
commands in the pipeline (prog2, prog3)?

Geraldo Veiga