Thanks all for your questions. I'm stacked, though in another problem. I have the script almost done but I'm having a small problem. I'm doing an "egrep "REPLICATION CLIENT|ALL" | wc -l" after the mysql -pwhatever -e "show grants for...etc" all this is redirected to a file using normal ">". So: for i in `cat file` do mysql -p -e "show grants etc.." "egrep "REPLICATION CLIENT|ALL" | wc -l > /tmp/whatever basically. /tmp/whatever has the following "format": server1:0 server2:1 server3:0 etc I use another "for" to read this file and decide whether the database has the right privileges, if it has REPLICATION CLIENT or ALL privileges, "wc -l" will return 1 or more than 1, if it doesn't have any of them it will be a 0. What's the problem? When I can't log into a mysql database (mostly cause it is down) I got a "0", what I want is to discard these machines, so they're not included in /tmp/whatever. I tried doing: grep -v "ERROR" and doing a 2> /dev/null after the mysql -p -e "show grants etc.." but it doesn't work. Any ideas? Thanks you all a lot. A