I'm stuck trying to work this one out and my Google skills are apparently lacking today.

This is a test bash script;

#!/bin/bash

do something | tee a.log

if [ $? -ne 0]; then echo broken fi

The problem with this script is $? contains the exit value of the tee command, but I want to check the exit value of whatever command I put in place of 'do something'.

How can I achieve this without loosing the tee operation, as 'do something' maybe a long running command with a lot of output like rsync?

I don't want to; result=`do something` if [ $? -ne 0... .... fi echo $result

As that won't output anything until the script has finished (the reason for the tee is that this script will be a scheduled cron tab but it may be run interactively sometimes also).

Thanks for reading :)