How do I get the exit code of command and not xterm?

Question

If I call a command (in my case another script) with xterm like so:

xterm -e sh second.sh

The value in $? after xterm returns

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

statusfile=$(mktemp)
xterm -e sh -c 'yourcommand; echo $? > '$statusfile
status=$(cat $statusfile)
rm $statusfile

The exit status of yourcommand is now in variable status.