@tcandela, that's a little function I put together a while back and keep reusing in a lot of my scripts where I want to write a log file for quick and easy access.
First, I define where the log is written:
# create log file in same directory as script
log="/Library/Logs/My Script.log"
Then I create a function named "logresult". It writes a timestamped message to the log file defined above.
function logresult() {
if [ $? = 0 ] ; then
/bin/date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S $1" >> "$log"
else
/bin/date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S $2" >> "$log"
fi
} Usually, all I want to know is whether a command succeeded or failed. If I run $? immediately after any command it'll either return 0 (success) or something other than 0 like 1 (fail).
When I want to log "success" or "fail", I write immediately after the command:
logresult "Success" "Fail"
The positions of "Success" and "Fail" are like script parameters. "Success" = "$1" and "Fail" = "$2". If I needed more options I could write something like:
logresult "Yes" "No" "I don't know" "I don't care"
"Yes" = "$1"
"No" = "$2"
"I don't know" = "$3"
"I don't care" = "$4"
Putting it all together:
- Run a command
- Immediately run the "logresult" function with a message for success as the "$1" parameter and a message for fail as the "$2" parameter.
- The function runs $? to see if the command returned 0 or something else.
- The if statement in the function writes the success message ($1) to the log if the command returned 0. Otherwise, it writes the fail message ($2) to the log file if the command returned something other than 0.
