checking wget's return value [if]

bash wget

Igor · Apr 27, 2010 · Viewed 86.4k times · Source

I'm writing a script to download a bunch of files, and I want it to inform when a particular file doesn't exist.

r=`wget -q www.someurl.com`
if [ $r -ne 0 ]
  then echo "Not there"
  else echo "OK"
fi

But it gives the following error on execution:

./file: line 2: [: -ne: unary operator expected

What's wrong?

Answer

Others have correctly posted that you can use $? to get the most recent exit code:

wget_output=$(wget -q "$URL")
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    ...

This lets you capture both the stdout and the exit code. If you don't actually care what it prints, you can just test it directly:

if wget -q "$URL"; then
    ...

And if you want to suppress the output:

if wget -q "$URL" > /dev/null; then
    ...