Error Handling In 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 measured
How To Catch Exception In Shell Script
in terms of the program's robustness. That is, the program's ability to handle situations in file handling in unix shell scripting which something goes wrong. Exit status As you recall from previous lessons, every well-written program returns an exit status when it finishes. If unix shell script exit on error 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 of programs
Korn Shell Error Handling
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 lines change the
For Loop In A Shell Script
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 write the script this way: # C
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Shell Script Exit Code
& Linux Questions Tags Users Badges Unanswered Ask Question _ Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for bash if exit code users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up http://linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php and rise to the top How to catch an error in a linux bash script? up vote 5 down vote favorite 1 I made the following script: # !/bin/bash # OUTPUT-COLORING red='\e[0;31m' green='\e[0;32m' NC='\e[0m' # No Color # FUNCTIONS # directoryExists - Does the directory exist? function directoryExists { cd $1 if [ $? = 0 ] then echo -e "${green}$1${NC}" else echo -e "${red}$1${NC}" fi } # EXE directoryExists "~/foobar" directoryExists "/www/html/drupal" http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/97101/how-to-catch-an-error-in-a-linux-bash-script The script works, but beside my echoes, there is also the output when cd $1 fails on execution. testscripts//test_labo3: line 11: cd: ~/foobar: No such file or directory Is it possible to catch this? bash shell shell-script error-handling share|improve this question edited Oct 22 '13 at 22:58 Gilles 371k686741124 asked Oct 22 '13 at 10:29 Thomas De Wilde 28114 Just an FYI, you can also do this a lot simpler; test -d /path/to/directory ( or [[ -d /path/to/directory ]] in bash ) will tell you whether a given target is a directory or not, and it will do it quietly. –Patrick Oct 22 '13 at 12:36 @Patrick, that just tests if it's a directory, not if you can cd into it. –Stéphane Chazelas Oct 22 '13 at 12:54 @StephaneChazelas yes. The function name is directoryExists. –Patrick Oct 22 '13 at 13:57 add a comment| 5 Answers 5 active oldest votes up vote 4 down vote accepted Your script changes directories as it runs, which means it won't work with a series of relative pathnames. You then commented later that you only wanted to check for directory existence, not the ability to use cd, so answers don't need to use cd at all. Revised. Using tput and colours from man terminfo: #!/bin/bash -
Bash Prompts About Writing Robust Bash Shell Scripts Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/ It's possible to write scripts which minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several http://askubuntu.com/questions/509795/how-to-write-a-portable-shell-script-with-error-handling techniques for writing robust bash scripts. Use set -u How often have you written a script that broke because a variable wasn't set? I know I have, many times. chroot=$1 ... rm -rf $chroot/usr/share/doc If you ran the script above and accidentally forgot to give a parameter, you would have just deleted all of your system documentation rather than shell script making a smaller chroot. So what can you do about it? Fortunately bash provides you with set -u, which will exit your script if you try to use an uninitialised variable. You can also use the slightly more readable set -o nounset. david% bash /tmp/shrink-chroot.sh $chroot= david% bash -u /tmp/shrink-chroot.sh /tmp/shrink-chroot.sh: line 3: $1: unbound variable david% Use set -e Every script you write should include set -e at the top. This tells bash that it should exit the unix shell script script if any statement returns a non-true return value. The benefit of using -e is that it prevents errors snowballing into serious issues when they could have been caught earlier. Again, for readability you may want to use set -o errexit. Using -e gives you error checking for free. If you forget to check something, bash will do it or you. Unfortunately it means you can't check $? as bash will never get to the checking code if it isn't zero. There are other constructs you could use: command if [ "$?"-ne 0]; then echo "command failed"; exit 1; fi could be replaced with command || { echo "command failed"; exit 1; } or if ! command; then echo "command failed"; exit 1; fi What if you have a command that returns non-zero or you are not interested in its return value? You can use command || true, or if you have a longer section of code, you can turn off the error checking, but I recommend you use this sparingly. set +e command1 command2 set -e On a slightly related note, by default bash takes the error status of the last item in a pipeline, which may not be what you want. For example, false | true will be considered to have succeeded. If you would like this to fail, then you can use set -o pipe
communities company blog Stack Exchange Inbox Reputation and Badges sign up log in tour help Tour Start here for a quick overview of the site Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have Meta Discuss the workings and policies of this site About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company Business Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us Ask Ubuntu Questions Tags Users Badges Unanswered Ask Question _ Ask Ubuntu is a question and answer site for Ubuntu users and developers. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top How to write a portable shell script with error handling up vote 5 down vote favorite I have had relatively good success at writing portable, full-featured shell shell scripts by using /bin/sh, for example: #!/bin/sh trap 'echo "Error on line $LINENO"; exit 1' ERR while read LINE do echo "+ $LINE" done < file.txt this works on BSD because /bin/sh is typically an alias to ksh $ ls -li /bin/{sh,ksh} 26768 -r-xr-xr-x 3 root bin 418612 Jun 18 17:41 /bin/ksh 26768 -r-xr-xr-x 3 root bin 418612 Jun 18 17:41 /bin/sh While on MacOS and many Linux distros simply symlink /bin/sh to bash $ ls -li /bin/{sh,bash} 17170438 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 938832 Jul 18 2013 /bin/bash 17170540 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Feb 19 12:42 /bin/sh -> bash If these two conditions are true then I can use a relatively rich feature set common to both KSH and BASH. On Ubuntu the default shell only supports POSIX features. Is it still possible to write a cross-platform shell script that also incorporates error handling? Edit (2014-08-18) The solution I came up with was to auto-upgrade the script if the given shell doesn't understand the ERR trap #!/