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From: Malcolm Kay <malcolm.kay@internode.on.net>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: how can I find out which md device I just used ? (mdconfig)
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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:54 pm, user wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Malcolm Kay wrote:
> > On my system (5.4) mdconfig reports the created device to
> > stdout: So:
> > 	memdevice=`mdconfig -a -t malloc -s10M`
> > sets the device name in $memdevice.
>
> Thank you very much - I have just verified that this works the
> same way on FreeBSD 6.0.  I appreciate your help.
>
> I am curious, I am doing two things at one here - setting the
> variable _and_ configging the md device.  What is the best
> way, in a shell script, to also test to make sure that the
> device configured properly ?
>
> If the device does not configure properly, all I see is that I
> get a empty variable ... would it be appropriate to `text -z`
> that variable to see if it is zero ?  Or is there a better way
> to approach that ?
>
I imagine that like most unix utilities it returns status 0 on 
success and non-zero on failure.
So imediately after:
 	memdevice=`mdconfig -a -t malloc -s10M`
Use:
        if [ $? -ne 0 ] 
        then
          echo "mdconfig failed"
          exit 1
        fi

Malcolm Kay

> Basically I do not want to act unless I am sure that the
> mdconfig actually happened, and there really is a variable
> defined...