Thanks for the reply, Philip. I am newbie at linux.I did go thru the diald Howto... I just wanted to clear one small glitch. When my eth crd is not detected, the system will give me an output "connect : Network is unreachble" on trying to ping.(ping,say VSNL) In cse I want to divert this commnd to an evaluation n it's value to variable in a script,I will need to 'grep' the output of ping. This I have tried already(grep o/p of ping when the network card is down) The o/p of ping is not fed to grep for comparing patterns, rather, the script just puts up the message of 'Network is unreachable' on the monitor,and goes ahead executing the script. I would like to know,is there any specific way I can catch this output and then grep it to evaluate and set the condition right for the script to detect the eth card is not being detected and perform the necessry software resolving. Thank you Vidhata
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