Hi I just posted a note on "Re^2: best practices for checking system return values for piped commands?", but figured I really needed to post a question, so apologies if this seems like a double post...
I'm struggling with trying to identify a failure in a set of piped commands run on a remote host via ssh. I use perl to build and run the command line as below 
ssh $TARGET_HOST "sudo find $TARGET_DIR -name \'$TARGET_FILE\' |
sudo cpio --create --format ustar" |
bzip2 -9 -c

[download]
Initially I just redirected the output to a file, which is fine if both the $TARGET_DIR and $TARGET_FILE exists. However, if one or both do not exist, then I still get a file created, but it's an empty .tar.bz2 file of a few bytes.
Things I've tried:
With $ret=system($cmd); and testing the the value of $ret:
  • Pre-fixing the cmd with set -o pipefail &&.
  • Adding set -o pipefail to the command run by ssh.
  • Adding set -o pipefail to the command run by sudo.
  • Doing the bzip2 locally.
    With @results = `$cmd`, and testing the value of $?:
  • Adding ; echo \${PIPESTATUS\@}; to the end of $cmd, within the string passed to ssh.
  • Adding ; echo \${PIPESTATUS\@}; to the end of $cmd, after the string passed to ssh.
    Using the @results approach, I only get one entry, so I suspect that the backtick method only sees one stream?

    Any ideas on how I can detect the remote pipeline failure? I'm using perl 5.8.5, bash 3.00.15(1) over RedHat ELAS4.5. I would not be permitted to install the Net::Ssh module.

    In reply to Detecting failed piped command run via ssh by devnull

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