From elwasif@cs.utk.edu Mon Aug 4 08:46:37 1997 > hi... I am having trouble with my tls lab in that when I execute the > following statement: > catch {exec grep $filter out.file} final > the child process (grep) terminates abnormally ... yet I can execute > grep 'tcl' out.file > with no difficulty and get the proper results (where $filter = 'tcl'). > ...of course "grep 'tcl' out.file" is running under my unix shell and > the source file "out.file" does exist (it is created by the tcl script). > > Any suggestions would be appreciated. > I've had the same problem. It appears to occur when grep fails to find any matches in the searched file and hence just returns with no error messages. You may want to check for such a string in $final (I did). There are also return error codes that you can look up at http://www.elf.org/tcltk-man-html/TclCmd/contents.htm Wael