best way to programmatically check for a failed scp in a shell script

Question

I have a shell script that I'm working on with this line of code that does a loop through local files (.gz) and does an scp. I want to test for a failed scp if possible. I am doing a loop so I can echo each file name to a log so I can keep track of it.

Can someone show me how to check for failed scp? or better yet, a good code example to do this? Thanks for your help.

for gzfile in $LOCALDMPDIR/*.gz
do
  /usr/bin/scp -P 2222 -i $KEYFILE $gzfile foobar@$1:$TGTDIR
  echo "$gzfile is done. " 2>&1
done

Answer 1

Use $? to access the return value of the last command. Check the man page for scp to verify, but I think a return value of zero means success. A non-zero value means some kind of failure.