Question

I have done a shell script that gets the output of a .jar file and assign in to a variable.

rewards_generator.sh

APP_ROOT=/home/testApps/
JAR=${APP_ROOT}ClusterGenerator/generator.jar

#get clusters
clusters=$(loadClusters $1)

for i in `echo $clusters | sed 's/,/ /g'`
do
    #pull cluster records from database and save query return status to $x
    x=$(/usr/IBM/WebSphere/ProcServer/java/bin/java ${JAR} ${i/-/_} 2>&1)
done

Basically, what I’ve done to the java app is to System.out.print the query return status. Then used the 2>&1 in bash in order to get into the output stream and assign the value to a shell script variable.

Now how can I get the return value of a perl script and assign it to a shell script variable? Is it the same as the one I’ve done above or is there any other approach to do this?

Answer 1

You can use backticks to record the output of an external command in a bash script.

Here’s a simple example:

#!/bin/bash

# Execute the script, recording output to a variable
x=`/path/to/script.pl`

# Display or act on the output some time later
echo "script output: $x"