Linux Bash Script Catch Error
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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 shell script error handling more about hiring developers or posting ads with us Stack Overflow Questions Jobs Documentation Tags shell script exit code Users Badges Ask Question x Dismiss Join the Stack Overflow Community Stack Overflow is a community of 6.2 million programmers, just like you, shell script exit on error helping each other. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Error handling in BASH up vote 144 down vote favorite 110 What is your favorite method to handle errors in BASH? The best example of
1 &2 In Shell Script
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 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 bash error handling best practices was copied from
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 error handling in linux in terms of the program's robustness. That is, the program's ability to handle situations in
Bash Trap Exit Code
which something goes wrong. Exit status As you recall from previous lessons, every well-written program returns an exit status when it finishes.
Bash Error Message
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 of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/64786/error-handling-in-bash 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 lines change http://linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php 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 write the script this way
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 http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/97101/how-to-catch-an-error-in-a-linux-bash-script this site About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company Business Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us Unix & Linux Questions Tags Users Badges Unanswered Ask Question _ Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Here's how shell script it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up 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 { shell script exit cd $1 if [ $? = 0 ] then echo -e "${green}$1${NC}" else echo -e "${red}$1${NC}" fi } # EXE directoryExists "~/foobar" directoryExists "/www/html/drupal" 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 372k696761127 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,