I have a shell script (bash) that performs a backup operation each night. This morning it generated an error code that I do not understand. To be honest, I am not sure if the shell generates the exit status of a command, or if the command itself does. Can anyone help explain this to me? I tried checking out the man page for cpio but I didn't find my answer there. I didn't come across anything helpful in my Unix books either. The system is RedHat 6.2 using the default shell. Here is the snippet of code that grabs the exit code of the cpio command. All I know is that exit code 0 indicates the command run successfully. This generated a 2 last night. What might 1-?? indicate? cpio -ocB < $WORKDIR/AB_$DATE > $TAPE WRITEOK=`echo $?` Thanks in advance, Mike Glaser --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org