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 :) -- James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?