little bit of unix command line scripting help please

[johnyboy]

i want to write a simple quick and dirty script that makes a whois query and emails me when the word SUSPENDED doesn't occur in the output. i've got the basics done. i just need to know how to join two bits i've got together so that the second bit gets run conditionally.

apparently:
whois thedomain.com | grep -q SUSPENDED
returns 0 if the word SUSPENDED is part of the output of the whois lookup.

and
message.txt | sendmail myemail@address.com

sends me an email containing the contents of the file message.txt (can't work out how to send a message from the command line rather than a file pointed to from the command line but that really doesn't matter)

so, how can i conditionally run 'message.txt | sendmail myemail@address.com' based on the response from 'whois thedomain.com | grep -q SUSPENDED' somehow in a script?

having done the script i'm going to have it trigerred every day by a cron job.

i'm using mac os x 10.3 so therefore unix.

thanks.

[chris_fuel]

The variable $? holds the return value of the last run command , so you can compare it to 0 to see if the script ran properly.

[johnyboy]

thanks. how do you say:

if( $? != 0 ) message.txt | sendmail myemail@address.com

in unix/bash/sh/whatever langauge?

[chris_fuel]

whois thedomain.com | grep -q SUSPENDED

if [ $? == 0 ]
then
   message.txt | sendmail myemail@address.com
fi

should do the trick for you

[johnyboy]

excellent, i'll give that a go. thanks.