unix shell, getting exit code with piped child

Question

Let\'s say I do this in a unix shell

$ some-script.sh | grep mytext

$ echo $?

this will give me the exit code of grep

Answer 1

There are multiple solutions, it depends on what you want to do exactly.

The easiest and understandable way would be to send the output to a file, then grep for it after saving the exit code:

tmpfile=$(mktemp)
./some-script.sh > $tmpfile
retval=$?
grep mytext $tmpfile
rm tmpfile