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I am having two shell scripts, say script1.sh and script2.sh. I am calling script2.sh from script1.sh. In script2.sh a few evaluations are done and based the results a flag is being set. Now i need to pass the flag to script1.sh based on which it will be decided whether the script1.sh should continue it execution or exit. I am not using functions. and while i export the flag, in script1.sh it is blank.
My question now is how do i return the flag from script2.sh ?
Any help ? Any Ideas? Experiences to share?

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

You could print the result and capture it in script1:

# Script 1
flag="$(./script2.bash)"

And:

# Script 2
[...]
printf '%s\n' "$flag"

Hope this helps =)

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3
  • I would prefer this solution. Keep in mind that a non-zero exit status typically indicates an error; script2.bash may have have several different non-error conditions that result in distinct flag values for script1.bash.
    – chepner
    Commented Oct 17, 2012 at 14:39
  • Do you know the solution to return multiple values instead of one?
    – Amir
    Commented Aug 14, 2016 at 23:08
  • I usually return them together as one value, separated by a delimiter that's not present in the variables. Then I use cut to separate the return value into multiple values. So, on Script 2 I'd do something like: printf '%s,%s\n' "$var1" "$var2" (notice the , delimeter inside the printf format string). Then on Script 1 I'd do: single_value="$(./script1.bash)" followed by var1="$(echo "$single_value" | cut -f1 -d',')" and var2="$(echo $single_value" | cut -f2 -d',')". The -d specifies the delimiter (in this case, ,), and the -f specifies which field. Hope this helps =)
    – Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho
    Commented Aug 20, 2016 at 15:33
2

Just use the exit status of script2:

if script2.sh ; then
   echo Exited with zero value
else
   echo Exited with non zero
fi

Use exit 0 or exit 1 in script2 to set the flag.

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1

I would expect you to use the return code from script2.sh (se by the statement exit {value})

e.g. 

./script2.sh

$? contains the return value from script2.sh's exit statement.

You can't use export here. export makes the variable available to subsequent subprocesses. It can't be used to communicate a value back to a parent process, since you're modifying a copy of the variable particular to the subprocess.

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