** Reply to note from theo@ccnet3.ccnet.com Fri, 9 Jan 1998
14:29:32 -0800
>
> > Import deletes the AREAS file when it's done (in fact it
deletes all
> > the files), so if you test to see whether or not AREAS
still exists,
> > that should be a pretty decent indicator of success or
failure.
>
> I already check for the above, but I have had unsuccessful
imports,
> even though the files were deleted. I think, import will
print
> error messages, if something is wrong with the files, and
still
> delete the files at the end.
>
> I guess what I want to know is not just the the import
commmand
> sucessfully ran, but that it actually transferred something
to
> inbox or news.dat. (Oh lord, I guess I could test for these
> files increasing, but that is a cumbersome solution).
>
I think you are right about 'import' deleting the AREAS file
even when something went wrong, but on the other hand I've had
so rarely any trouble with import that better error checking
(beyond checking existence of AREAS) doesn't matter for me.
Anyway, wouldn't piping the import output to a text file and
then searching error msgs in this file be a solution for you?
All you needed were a decent find or grep utility that returns
error levels and some clues above the structure of import's
error msgs. The latter is the difficult part, of course...
Regards, MQ
-- _________________________________________________________ Markus Quandt Markus.Quandt@Uni-Koeln.DE Koeln Cologne, Germany