Question

I have a process that just finished (it was written in C) so I return a number in main to tell the status. How can I get this value from the process that just finished in the shell?

Answer 1

Try using echo $? directly after you run your command:

 $ ./myprogram
 $ echo $?

If you are trying to base a decision on the success of your command, you can use &&:

 $ ./myprogram && echo success

if you are trying to base a decision on the failure of your command, you can use ||:

 $ ./myprogram || echo failure

These two things are sometimes called “short circuiting”