Bash Shell PHP Script Status

I need some help. The clip of the bash script below reads a directory full of files and then calls a php script for each file that parses an xml file and inserts some data into a database. I am unsure how to get the status of the of the php script so I can check for xml parse errors or database insert errors in the php script before continuing with the next file. Will the php script return any codes to the shell, and If so how do I capture them? Error checking is performed in the php script. I would like to have an if statement right below the script that checks the return codes from the php script. example of what I think I need: if [return_code==0] # where do I get the codes from the script, error are produced in the php file when they exist. then move my files around else write an error and move to the next files fi Here is the clip of the bash script that is run by cron. if [ -e "$semaphore" ] then process_dir=/opt/pipechain/CS01/snd/process cp $i $process_dir/process.dat /usr/local/bin/cs01_inbound.sh # this is where I call the script. If the script completes success I want to continue. ### if statement goes here I believe #move the .sem file to the tmp directory tmp_dir=/opt/pipechain/CS01/tmp echo "Semaphore File Exist--> Processing $i" mv $semaphore $tmp_dir/$semaphore echo "This is the Sem --> $semaphore file" inp_dir=/opt/pipechain/CS01/inp dat_file=$semfile.dat echo "This is the data --> $dat_file file" mv $dat_file $inp_dir/$dat_file else echo "No semaphore file exist for $i" fi