fileexist=0 for i in $( ls /data/read-only/clv/daily/Finished-HADOOP_EXPORT_&processDate#.done); do mv /data/read-only/clv/daily/Finished-HADOOP_EXPORT_&processDate#.done /data/read-only/clv/daily/archieve-wip/ fileexist=1 done --some other script below Above is the shell script I have in which in the for loop, I am moving some files. I want to notify myself via email if something wrong got happened in the moving process, as I am running this script on the Hadoop Cluster, so it might be possible that cluster went down while this was running etc etc. So how can I have better error handling mechanism in this shell script? Any thoughts?