Error traping in nautilus scripts

[dertiger]

I'm a beginner at shell scripts and I need to learn a few more tricks to compete a task I have. I have created a very simple nautilus script to archive some files onto my server. It is simply an SCP command. It does not run in a terminal and it provides no feedback (other than asking for a password). I would like to know that the process finished successfully (or more importantly, if it didn't). How do I trap errors and display them in a gnome dialog box?

Thanks

[Cabhan]

When you say "Nautilus script", I assume that you mean "Bash script"? Which is to say, it's a shell script, just you're running it from Nautilus.

Now then: the variable $? holds the return code of the last executed program. So if you check the value of $? just after you run scp, you'll get its return code. From scp's man page:

The scp utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

As far as popping up a dialog box, I'm coming up a bit dry. One option would be to write a Tcl/Tk script to do this, but it may be overkill. There's also the option of using dialog: you could end your script with:

exitstat = $?
if [ $exitstat -eq 0 ]; then
    message=All Good
else
    message=Error in Running
fi

xterm -e "dialog --title \"scp Exit Status\" --msgbox \"$message\" 0 0"

dialog creates an ncurses-based notification, but since we're popping up a new xterm, it should be alright.

Check "man dialog" for more information.

[dertiger]

I found some other scripts use zenity for handling dialog boxes. I wrote this code:

#!/bin/bash
<scp command>

exitstat = $?

if [ $exitstat -eq 0 ] then
    zenity --info --text="Archive Successful"
else
    zenity --info --text="Archive Failed"
fi

However, I always get the "Archive Failed" result. I have confirmed that the scp was successful and that the command returned 0:

<scp command>
exitstat = $?
zenity --info --text=$exitstat

All the references I've looked at indicate the if statement is well formed. Could I be missing anything else?

[Franklin52]

exitstat = $?

Remove the spaces around the "=" like this:

exitstat=$?

Regards