Check wget's return value

Question

I'm writing a script to download a bunch of files, and I want it to inform when a particular file doesn't exist.

r=`wget -q www.someurl.com` if [ $r -ne 0 ]   then echo "Not there"   else echo "OK" fi 

But it gives the following error on execution:

./file: line 2: [: -ne: unary operator expected

What's wrong?

Answer 1

Others have correctly posted that you can use $? to get the most recent exit code:

wget_output=$(wget -q "$URL") if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then     ... 

This lets you capture both the stdout and the exit code. If you don't actually care what it prints, you can just test it directly:

if wget -q "$URL"; then     ... 

And if you want to suppress the output:

if wget -q "$URL" > /dev/null; then     ...