John, my guess is the command output you are looking for is STDERR, not
STDOUT.   I would do something like this:

VALIDATE=`bpduplicate -p -id ${TAPE_ID} 2>&1`

This will redirect STDERR into STDOUT so you can capture the text.

Regards,

Jon


On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Camara, John wrote:

> I'm writing a script that will expire tapes greater than 30 days old and
> move them into the scratch pool.  Before I do that however, I'd like to run
> a test to verify that the tapes have been vaulted.  The method I've been
> attempting to use in Solaris 2.7 is as follows:
>  
> bpduplicate -p -id ${TAPE_ID}
> If the command returns
>   INF - found no images or media matching the selection criteria
> Then I know the tape has been duplicated.
>  
> That's fine one at a time, but when I script it I want to assign it to a
> variable.
> However, I can't seem to assign the above string to a variable.
>  
> for example:
> VALIDATE=`bpduplicate -p -id ${TAPE_ID}`
> If I echo $VALIDATE it returns nothing.
>  
> Does anyone know how I can get the output of bpduplicate into a variable.
> If not, does anyone out there have a different way of validating that a tape
> has been vaulted?
>  
> Thanks,
> John Camara
>  
>  
>  
>  
>