Error Codes Unix Shell Script
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and Signals and Traps (Oh My!) - Part 1 by William Shotts, Jr. In this lesson, we're going to look at handling errors during the execution of your scripts. The difference between a good program and a poor one is often unix shell script exit code measured in terms of the program's robustness. That is, the program's ability to handle situations linux error codes 127 in which something goes wrong. Exit status As you recall from previous lessons, every well-written program returns an exit status when it
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finishes. If a program finishes successfully, the exit status will be zero. If the exit status is anything other than zero, then the program failed in some way. It is very important to check the exit status
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of programs you call in your scripts. It is also important that your scripts return a meaningful exit status when they finish. I once had a Unix system administrator who wrote a script for a production system containing the following 2 lines of code: # Example of a really bad idea cd $some_directory rm * Why is this such a bad way of doing it? It's not, if nothing goes wrong. The two ubuntu error codes lines change the working directory to the name contained in $some_directory and delete the files in that directory. That's the intended behavior. But what happens if the directory named in $some_directory doesn't exist? In that case, the cd command will fail and the script executes the rm command on the current working directory. Not the intended behavior! By the way, my hapless system administrator's script suffered this very failure and it destroyed a large portion of an important production system. Don't let this happen to you! The problem with the script was that it did not check the exit status of the cd command before proceeding with the rm command. Checking the exit status There are several ways you can get and respond to the exit status of a program. First, you can examine the contents of the $? environment variable. $? will contain the exit status of the last command executed. You can see this work with the following: [me] $ true; echo $? 0 [me] $ false; echo $? 1 The true and false commands are programs that do nothing except return an exit status of zero and one, respectively. Using them, we can see how the $? environment variable contains the exit status of the previous program. So to check the exit status, we could
>ExampleComments1Catchall for general errorslet "var1 = 1/0"Miscellaneous errors, such as "divide by zero" and other impermissible operations2Misuse of shell builtins (according to
Linux System Error Codes
Bash documentation)empty_function() {}Missing keyword or command, or permission problem (and diff return code on a failed binary file comparison).126Command invoked cannot execute/dev/nullPermission problem bash exit code check or command is not an executable127"command not found"illegal_commandPossible problem with $PATH or a typo128Invalid argument to exitexit 3.14159exit takes http://linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php only integer args in the range 0 - 255 (see first footnote)128+nFatal error signal "n"kill -9 $PPID of script$? returns 137 (128 + 9)130Script terminated by Control-CCtl-CControl-C is fatal error signal 2, (130 = 128 + 2, see above)255*Exit status out of rangeexit http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html -1exit takes only integer args in the range 0 - 255
Aug 2004 on RedHat 7.3 #define EPERM 1 /* Operation not permitted */ #define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */ #define ESRCH 3 /* No such process */ #define EINTR 4 /* Interrupted system call */ #define EIO 5 /* http://www-numi.fnal.gov/offline_software/srt_public_context/WebDocs/Errors/unix_system_errors.html I/O error */ #define ENXIO 6 /* No such device or address */ #define E2BIG 7 /* Arg list too long */ #define ENOEXEC 8 /* Exec format error */ #define EBADF 9 /* Bad file number */ #define ECHILD 10 /* No child processes */ #define EAGAIN 11 /* Try again */ #define ENOMEM 12 /* Out of memory */ #define EACCES 13 /* Permission denied */ #define EFAULT 14 /* Bad address */ #define ENOTBLK 15 /* Block error codes device required */ #define EBUSY 16 /* Device or resource busy */ #define EEXIST 17 /* File exists */ #define EXDEV 18 /* Cross-device link */ #define ENODEV 19 /* No such device */ #define ENOTDIR 20 /* Not a directory */ #define EISDIR 21 /* Is a directory */ #define EINVAL 22 /* Invalid argument */ #define ENFILE 23 /* File table overflow */ #define EMFILE 24 /* Too many open files */ #define ENOTTY 25 /* Not a typewriter unix shell script */ #define ETXTBSY 26 /* Text file busy */ #define EFBIG 27 /* File too large */ #define ENOSPC 28 /* No space left on device */ #define ESPIPE 29 /* Illegal seek */ #define EROFS 30 /* Read-only file system */ #define EMLINK 31 /* Too many links */ #define EPIPE 32 /* Broken pipe */ #define EDOM 33 /* Math argument out of domain of func */ #define ERANGE 34 /* Math result not representable */ #define EDEADLK 35 /* Resource deadlock would occur */ #define ENAMETOOLONG 36 /* File name too long */ #define ENOLCK 37 /* No record locks available */ #define ENOSYS 38 /* Function not implemented */ #define ENOTEMPTY 39 /* Directory not empty */ #define ELOOP 40 /* Too many symbolic links encountered */ #define EWOULDBLOCK EAGAIN /* Operation would block */ #define ENOMSG 42 /* No message of desired type */ #define EIDRM 43 /* Identifier removed */ #define ECHRNG 44 /* Channel number out of range */ #define EL2NSYNC 45 /* Level 2 not synchronized */ #define EL3HLT 46 /* Level 3 halted */ #define EL3RST 47 /* Level 3 reset */ #define ELNRNG 48 /* Link number out of range */ #define EUNATCH 49 /* Protocol driver not attached */ #define ENOCSI 50 /* No CSI structure available */ #define EL2HLT 51 /* Level 2 halted */ #define EBADE 52 /* Invalid exchange */ #define EBADR 53 /* Invalid request