How to get the return value of a awk in a shell script? awk -F['|'] '{print $6}' file.txt In the above if the column 6 is null the script fails. How can I get the return value to do a check after this. Thanks Siva Hi, I'm trying to replace a column in a comma seperated file with a column in another file using sed/awk. Can anyone help me. Thanks Siva

Null fields are perfectly valid and not considered an error by awk.  But you can force whatever exit code you want: awk -F['|'] '{  if ($6=="")     exit 1  else     print $6}' file.txt awkstatus=$? if [ $awkstatus -ne 0 ] ; then    echo "awk exited with status code of $awkstatus" fi awk exited with status code of 1

Okay, great. Thanks. Siva Hi, I'm trying to replace a column in a comma seperated file with a column in another file using sed/awk. Can anyone help me. Thanks Siva