Checking the exit status of a ssh remote command in bash

Question

I need to check that a transacions file is published on a remote host. There is no transactions code published for today the 31 of December. I know that for certain. There i

Answer 1

Similar issues have been discussed here many times, see scp return code discussion 1

and 300+ answers when searching for scp errors

but to give you a working answer, consider trying this

 if 
     ssh -q -T user@capserbox "ls -ltr  /home/DropBox/transactions_${today}.csv" \
     | grep -q "transactions_${today}\.csv" ;
 then
       echo "this worked" 
 else
       echo "nope"
 fi

Sorry, I don't have any way to test this.

IHTH.

Answer 2

The "if" construct that you're using should work, and it does work for me:

$ if ssh -q -T localhost "ls -ltr /does/not/exist"; then echo succeeded; else echo failed; fi
Password:
ls: /does/not/exist: No such file or directory
failed

I notice that the error printed by your ls program is worded differently than the error that I got (and I tried two different systems). "file not found" in your case, "ls: file: No such file or directory" in mine. My suspicion is that the ls command which you're invoking here isn't the typical modern Unix command. You may be running a nonstandard version, a non-Unix version, or something very old, and it may not actually be exiting with a non-zero exit code for this particular error.

Answer 3

file="/home/DropBox/transactions_20141231.csv"
ssh -q -T user@capserbox "test -e $file"
ret="$?"
case $ret in
  0)
    echo "$file exists"
    ;;
  1)
    echo "$file does not exist"
    ;;
  *)
    echo "other problem"
    ;;
esac