Check if rsync command ran successful

linux bash shell rsync
user1670816 picture user1670816 · Jun 27, 2014 · Viewed 32.9k times · Source

The following bash-script is doing a rsync of a folder every hour:

#!/bin/bash
rsync -r -z -c /home/pi/queue [email protected]:/home/foobar
rm -rf rm /home/pi/queue/*
echo "Done"

But I found out that my Pi disconnected from the internet, so the rsync failed. So it did the following command, deleting the folder. How to determine if a rsync-command was successful, if it was, then it may remove the folder.

Answer

Benjamin Sonntag picture Benjamin Sonntag · Jun 27, 2014

Usually, any Unix command shall return 0 if it ran successfully, and non-0 in other cases.

Look at man rsync for exit codes that may be relevant to your situation, but I'd do that this way : 

#!/bin/bash
rsync -r -z -c /home/pi/queue [email protected]:/home/foobar && rm -rf rm /home/pi/queue/* && echo "Done"

Which will rm and echo done only if everything went fine.

Other way to do it would be by using $? variable which is always the return code of the previous command : 

#!/bin/bash
rsync -r -z -c /home/pi/queue [email protected]:/home/foobar
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
then
  rm -rf rm /home/pi/queue/*
  echo "Done"
else
  echo "Error while running rsync"
fi

see man rsync, section EXIT VALUES

Related questions

rsync copy over only certain types of files using include option

I use the following bash script to copy only files of certain extension(in this case *.sh), however it still copies over all the files. what's wrong? from=$1 to=$2 rsync -zarv --include="*.sh" $from $to

Read More
How to rsync files with matching pattern in path by keeping directory structure intact?

I want to copy all files from server A to server B that have the same parent directory-name in different levels of filesystem hierarchy, e.g: /var/lib/data/sub1/sub2/commonname/filetobecopied.foo /var/lib/data/sub1/sub3/commonname/…

Read More
How do I prompt for Yes/No/Cancel input in a Linux shell script?

I want to pause input in a shell script, and prompt the user for choices. The standard Yes, No, or Cancel type question. How do I accomplish this in a typical bash prompt?

Read More