Exit code of redirected command

Question

So I want to verify the exit code of a specific command

runuser -s /bin/bash @user_name -c $command > /dev/null 2>&1 &

How can I find whether the command runuser -s /bin/bash @user_name -c $command executed correctly? I tried using $? but it doesn't work because it is always 0 ( the result of redirection is 0)

How can i find the exit code of that command ?

Answer 1

The exit code is not available due to the backgrounding of the task (via &), not the redirection.

You should use wait to get the exit code of a background task.

wait command stop script execution until all jobs running in background have terminated, or until the job number or process id specified as an option terminates. It returns the exit status of waited-for command.

Answer 2

You can use $! in bash to get the pid of last background process. Then you can do wait pid. This waits until the process with pid is complete.

So for your script you can do something like this:

runuser -s /bin/bash @user_name -c $command > /dev/null 2>&1 &
myPid=$!
wait $myPid
status=$?
echo "Exit status of the process with pid: $myPid is $status"