Error In Shell Script
Contents |
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 bash error in shell script is often measured in terms of the program's robustness. That is, the program's ability
Shell Script Error Handling
to handle situations in which something goes wrong. Exit status As you recall from previous lessons, every well-written program returns an exit shell script error checking status when it 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 shell script error code to check the exit status 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,
Shell Script Error Bad Interpreter
if nothing goes wrong. The two 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 statu
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 shell script error code 1 which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. It's possible to write scripts which shell script error exit minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing robust bash scripts. Use set -u How often
Shell Script Error Command Not Found
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 http://linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php a parameter, you would have just deleted all of your system documentation rather than 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 http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/ variable david% Use set -e Every script you write should include set -e at the top. This tells bash that it should exit the 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 r
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 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/64786/error-handling-in-bash site About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company Business Learn more http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2870992/automatic-exit-from-bash-shell-script-on-error about hiring developers or posting ads with us Stack Overflow Questions Jobs Documentation Tags Users Badges Ask Question x Dismiss Join the Stack Overflow Community Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Error handling shell script in BASH up vote 143 down vote favorite 109 What is your favorite method to handle errors in BASH? The best example of handling errors in BASH I have found on the web was written by William Shotts, Jr at http://www.linuxcommand.org. William Shotts, Jr suggests using the following function for error handling in BASH: #!/bin/bash # A slicker error handling routine # I put a shell script error variable in my scripts named PROGNAME which # holds the name of the program being run. You can get this # value from the first item on the command line ($0). # Reference: This was copied from
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 Stack Overflow Questions Jobs Documentation Tags Users Badges Ask Question x Dismiss Join the Stack Overflow Community Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Automatic exit from bash shell script on error up vote 279 down vote favorite 48 I've been writing some shell script and I would find it useful if there was the ability to halt the execution of said shell script if any of the commands failed. See below for an example: #!/bin/bash cd some_dir ./configure --some-flags make make install So in this case if the script can't change to the indicated directory then it would certainly not want to do a ./configure afterwards if it fails. Now I'm well aware that I could have an if check for each command (which I think is a hopeless solution), but is there a global setting to make the script exit if one of the commands fails? bash shell exit share|improve this question edited Mar 29 '15 at 23:26 asked May 20 '10 at 4:21 radman 5,64462242 I did have a quick look for duplicates and couldn't find any. –radman May 20 '10 at 4:22 1 answer goes to Adam for the detail regarding set -e (which is exactly wanted). Also thanks to a_m0d for the info on traps (though not 100% relevant). –radman May 20 '10 at 5:07 add a comment| 7 Answers 7 active oldest votes up vote 444 down vote accepted Use the set -e builtin: #!/bin/bash set -e # Any subsequent(*) commands which fail will cause the shell script to exit immediately Alternatively, you can pass -e on the command line: bash -e my_script.sh You can also disable this behavior with set +e. (*) Note: The shell does not exit if the command that fails is part of the command list immediately following a while or until keyword, part of the test in an if statement, part of a && or || list, or if the command's return value is being inverted via ! (from man bash) share|improve this answer edited Jan 19 '15 at 16:52 Gilead 91211322 answered May 20 '10 at 4:36 Adam Rosenfield 242k66372493 1 Is this also a Bourne Shell builtin? –Tom May 16 '12 at 19:03 3 @Tom Yes: See pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/… –Max Nanasy Aug 3 '13 at 20:50 2 'Set +e' will revert the setting again, so you can have only certain blocks that exit automat