I have a C program with root privilege running on MontaVista Linux. I
want to reboot the system after my program does a lot of file I/O. I
call system("/sbin/reboot") in one thread of the C program, but I found
it does not always work.

Although the followings are shown on the console, but the system stalls
sometimes. Is there a way to force the system to reboot in a C program?

==============================
The system is going down NOW !!
Sending SIGTERM to all processes.
Watchdog Release expect value 0
SOFTDOG: WDT device closed unexpectedly.  WDT will not stop!
uartClose.
idiom: closing misc device
udhcpd[283]: Received a SIGTERM

Sending SIGKILL to all processes.
==============================

I also found that directly run "reboot" command on the console shell
works almost all the time. So I think perhaps I can start my program in
a shell script, and run "reboot" command from there when a specific
exit status of my program returns. However, I don't know how to catch
an exist status of a C program in a shell script. Any pointer or
comment is appreciated.

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* "banyan" <banyan8@yahoo.com.sg>
| However, I don't know how to catch an exist status of a C program in
| a shell script.

#!/bin/sh
some_command
echo "The exit status of some_command is $?"
# End of file

HTH
R'

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On 2007-01-25, banyan wrote:

> However, I don't know how to catch an exist status of a C program in
> a shell script.

The same way as you get the exit status from any program; it is
contained in $?.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson, author   |    <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
Shell Scripting Recipes:     |  My code in this post, if any,
A Problem-Solution Approach  |         is released under the
2005, Apress                 |    GNU General Public Licence

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Thanks for the pointer.

However, my program has to run in the background, i.e. "my_c_program &"
appear in the shell script, otherwise other starting scripts following
my program won't run. And I found the echo line will not come out when
my program exits. Any suggestion for such case?

On Jan 25, 10:41 pm, Ralf Fassel <ralf...@gmx.de> wrote:
> * "banyan" <bany...@yahoo.com.sg>
> | However, I don't know how to catch an exist status of a C program in
> | a shell script.
>
>  #!/bin/sh
>  some_command
>  echo "The exit status of some_command is $?"
>  # End of file
>
> HTH
> R'

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"banyan" <banyan8@yahoo.com.sg> writes:

>Thanks for the pointer.

>However, my program has to run in the background, i.e. "my_c_program &"
>appear in the shell script, otherwise other starting scripts following

You can run the shell script in background, or you can use the
'wait' shell built-in command, which waits for the specified bg
process to finish before proceeding (it is shell dependant though).

--
Gustavo Rondina
http://gustgr.freeshell.org

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* "banyan" <banyan8@yahoo.com.sg>
| However, my program has to run in the background, i.e. "my_c_program
| &" appear in the shell script, otherwise other starting scripts
| following my program won't run. And I found the echo line will not
| come out when my program exits. Any suggestion for such case?

my_c_program &
my_c_program_pid=$!

..do other things...

wait $my_c_program_pid
echo "The exit status of my_c_program is $?"

R'

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