In a shell script I am writing I need to be able to read the return value
from the tar command. The shell script is executing in the Bourne shell and
I have always been able to get the return status as follows ...

rm some_file
return=$?
echo ${return}

However with the tar command it always seems to return 0, whether it
succeeds or not. I have experimented with piping the output of the tar
through grep to detect errors but is there some easier way of doing things?
Am I missing something simple?

Thanks for the help

Stuart Brooks