I'm studying the content of this preinst file that the script executes before that package is unpacked from its Debian archive (.deb) file.
The script has the following code:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ "$1" = install ]; then
if [ -d /usr/share/MyApplicationName ]; then
echo "MyApplicationName is just installed"
return 1
fi
rm -Rf $HOME/.config/nautilus-actions/nautilus-actions.conf
rm -Rf $HOME/.local/share/file-manager/actions/*
fi
# End automatically added section
My first query is about the line:
set -e
I think that the rest of the script is pretty simple: It checks whether the Debian/Ubuntu package manager is executing an install operation. If it is, it checks whether my application has just been installed on the system. If it has, the script prints the message "MyApplicationName is just installed" and ends (return 1 mean that ends with an “error”, doesn’t it?).
If the user is asking the Debian/Ubuntu package system to install my package, the script also deletes two directories.
Is this right or am I missing something?
From help set :
-e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
But it's considered bad practice by some (bash FAQ and irc freenode #bash FAQ authors). It's recommended to use:
trap 'do_something' ERR
to run do_something function when errors occur.
See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
set -e stops the execution of a script if a command or pipeline has an error - which is the opposite of the default shell behaviour, which is to ignore errors in scripts. Type help set in a terminal to see the documentation for this built-in command.
I found this post while trying to figure out what the exit status was for a script that was aborted due to a set -e. The answer didn't appear obvious to me; hence this answer. Basically, set -e aborts the execution of a command (e.g. a shell script) and returns the exit status code of the command that failed (i.e. the inner script, not the outer script).
For example, suppose I have the shell script outer-test.sh:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
./inner-test.sh
exit 62;
The code for inner-test.sh is:
#!/bin/sh
exit 26;
When I run outer-script.sh from the command line, my outer script terminates with the exit code of the inner script:
$ ./outer-test.sh
$ echo $?
26
As per bash - The Set Builtin manual, if -e/errexit is set, the shell exits immediately if a pipeline consisting of a single simple command, a list or a compound command returns a non-zero status.
By default, the exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command in the pipeline, unless the pipefail option is enabled (it's disabled by default).
If so, the pipeline's return status of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully.
If you'd like to execute something on exit, try defining trap, for example:
trap onexit EXIT
where onexit is your function to do something on exit, like below which is printing the simple stack trace:
onexit(){ while caller $((n++)); do :; done; }
There is similar option -E/errtrace which would trap on ERR instead, e.g.:
trap onerr ERR
Examples
Zero status example:
$ true; echo $?
0
Non-zero status example:
$ false; echo $?
1
Negating status examples:
$ ! false; echo $?
0
$ false || true; echo $?
0
Test with pipefail being disabled:
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; true | true | true; echo success'; echo $?
success
0
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; false | false | true; echo success'; echo $?
success
0
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; true | true | false; echo success'; echo $?
1
Test with pipefail being enabled:
$ bash -c 'set -o pipefail -e; true | false | true; echo success'; echo $?
1
This is an old question, but none of the answers here discuss the use of set -e aka set -o errexit in Debian package handling scripts. The use of this option is mandatory in these scripts, per Debian policy; the intent is apparently to avoid any possibility of an unhandled error condition.
What this means in practice is that you have to understand under what conditions the commands you run could return an error, and handle each of those errors explicitly.
Common gotchas are e.g. diff (returns an error when there is a difference) and grep (returns an error when there is no match). You can avoid the errors with explicit handling:
diff this that ||
echo "$0: there was a difference" >&2
grep cat food ||
echo "$0: no cat in the food" >&2
(Notice also how we take care to include the current script's name in the message, and writing diagnostic messages to standard error instead of standard output.)
If no explicit handling is really necessary or useful, explicitly do nothing:
diff this that || true
grep cat food || :
(The use of the shell's : no-op command is slightly obscure, but fairly commonly seen.)
Just to reiterate,
something || other
is shorthand for
if something; then
: nothing
else
other
fi
i.e. we explicitly say other should be run if and only if something fails. The longhand if (and other shell flow control statements like while, until) is also a valid way to handle an error (indeed, if it weren't, shell scripts with set -e could never contain flow control statements!)
And also, just to be explicit, in the absence of a handler like this, set -e would cause the entire script to immediately fail with an error if diff found a difference, or if grep didn't find a match.
On the other hand, some commands don't produce an error exit status when you'd want them to. Commonly problematic commands are find (exit status does not reflect whether files were actually found) and sed (exit status won't reveal whether the script received any input or actually performed any commands successfully). A simple guard in some scenarios is to pipe to a command which does scream if there is no output:
find things | grep .
sed -e 's/o/me/' stuff | grep ^
It should be noted that the exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command in that pipeline. So the above commands actually completely mask the status of find and sed, and only tell you whether grep finally succeeded.
(Bash, of course, has set -o pipefail; but Debian package scripts cannot use Bash features. The policy firmly dictates the use of POSIX sh for these scripts, though this was not always the case.)
In many situations, this is something to separately watch out for when coding defensively. Sometimes you have to e.g. go through a temporary file so you can see whether the command which produced that output finished successfully, even when idiom and convenience would otherwise direct you to use a shell pipeline.
I believe the intention is for the script in question to fail fast.
To test this yourself, simply type set -e at a bash prompt. Now, try running ls. You'll get a directory listing. Now, type lsd. That command is not recognized and will return an error code, and so your bash prompt will close (due to set -e).
Now, to understand this in the context of a 'script', use this simple script:
#!/bin/bash
# set -e
lsd
ls
If you run it as is, you'll get the directory listing from the ls on the last line. If you uncomment the set -e and run again, you won't see the directory listing as bash stops processing once it encounters the error from lsd.
set -e The set -e option instructs bash to immediately exit if any command [1] has a non-zero exit status. You wouldn't want to set this for your command-line shell, but in a script it's massively helpful. In all widely used general-purpose programming languages, an unhandled runtime error - whether that's a thrown exception in Java, or a segmentation fault in C, or a syntax error in Python - immediately halts execution of the program; subsequent lines are not executed.
By default, bash does not do this. This default behavior is exactly what you want if you are using bash on the command line
you don't want a typo to log you out! But in a script, you really want the opposite.
If one line in a script fails, but the last line succeeds, the whole script has a successful exit code. That makes it very easy to miss the error.
Again, what you want when using bash as your command-line shell and using it in scripts are at odds here. Being intolerant of errors is a lot better in scripts, and that's what set -e gives you.
copied from : https://gist.github.com/mohanpedala/1e2ff5661761d3abd0385e8223e16425
this may help you .
Script 1: without setting -e
#!/bin/bash
decho "hi"
echo "hello"
This will throw error in decho and program continuous to next line
Script 2: With setting -e
#!/bin/bash
set -e
decho "hi"
echo "hello"
# Up to decho "hi" shell will process and program exit, it will not proceed further
It stops execution of a script if a command fails.
A notable exception is an if statement. eg:
set -e
false
echo never executed
set -e
if false; then
echo never executed
fi
echo executed
false
echo never executed
cat a.sh
#! /bin/bash
#going forward report subshell or command exit value if errors
#set -e
(cat b.txt)
echo "hi"
./a.sh; echo $?
cat: b.txt: No such file or directory
hi
0
with set -e commented out we see that echo "hi" exit status being reported and hi is printed.
cat a.sh
#! /bin/bash
#going forward report subshell or command exit value if errors
set -e
(cat b.txt)
echo "hi"
./a.sh; echo $?
cat: b.txt: No such file or directory
1
Now we see b.txt error being reported instead and no hi printed.
So default behaviour of shell script is to ignore command errors and continue processing and report exit status of last command. If you want to exit on error and report its status we can use -e option.
In a nodejs project I have a shortcut yarn lint that runs couple of linters in such way:
lint_1 && lint_2 && lint_3
If any of these find an error it return an error code, as a result yarn lint itself returns error code, as a result - build fails.
It works somewhat fine, catches all the errors though there is a small issue: If a linter fails with error code - rest of the linters wont be executed.
What I would like - execute all of them (so they all print all errors) and only then fail.
I know that I can create a bash script (that I will run in yarn lint), run each of the linters one by one collecting return codes and then check if any of codes is non-zero - exit 1 and it will fail the yarn lint. But I am wondering is there more elegant way to do it?
You could trap on ERR and set a flag. This would run each of the linters and exit with failure if any one of them fails:
#!/bin/bash
result=0
trap 'result=1' ERR
lint_1
lint_2
lint_3
exit "$result"
What I would like - execute all of them (so they all print all errors) and only then fail
Basically we have a list of exit codes to catch. If any of them is nonzero, we need to set a variable to have nonzero value. Expanding that to a list, would look like this:
result=0
if ! lint_1; then result=1; fi
if ! lint_2; then result=1; fi
if ! lint_3; then result=1; fi
exit "$result"
As a programmer, I see that we have a pattern here. So we can go with an array, but bash does not have 2d arrays. It would be a workaround with eval to get around quoted parameters. It is doable. You have to use eval, to double evaulate the array "pointer"/name, but works. Note that eval is evil.
cmds_1=(lint_1 "arg with spaces you pass to lint_1")
cmds_2=(lint_2)
cmds_3=(lint_3)
result=0
# compgen results list of variables starting with `cmds_`
# so naming is important
for i in $(compgen -v cmds_); do
# at first, `$i` is only expanded
# then the array is expanded `"${cmds_?[#]}"`
if ! eval "\"\${$i[#]}\""; then
result=1
fi
done
exit "$result"
We can also go with xargs. From manual EXIT STATUS is 123 if __any__ invocation of the command exited with status 1-125. If you know that your programs will exit between 1-125 exit status you can (usually xargs handles different exit statuses correctly anyway (returns 123), but let's stay conforming):
xargs -l1 -- bash -c '"$#"' -- <<EOF
lint_1 "arg with spaces you pass to lint_1"
lint_2
lint_3
EOF
result=$? # or just exit "$?"
exit "$result"
which looks strangely clean. On a side note, by passing just -P <number of jobs> to xargs you can execute all the command in parallel. You can accommodate for the 1-125 error range, by handling the error inside the bash script, ie.
xargs -l1 -- bash -c '"$#" || exit 1' -- <<EOF
lint_1 "arg with spaces you pass to lint_1"
lint_2
lint_3
EOF
result=$?
exit "$result"
And I have another idea. After each command we can output the return status on a dedicated file descriptor. Then from all return statuses filter zeros and check if there are any other statuses on the stream. If they are, we should exit with nonzero status. This feels like a work-done-around and is basically the same as the first code snipped, but the if ! ....; then result=1; fi is simplified to ; echo $? >&10.
tmp=$(mktemp)
(
lint_1 "arg with spaces you pass to lint_1"; echo $? >&10
lint_2; echo $? >&10
lint_3; echo $? >&10
) 10> >(
[ -z "$(grep -v 0)" ]
echo $? > "$tmp"
)
result="$(cat "$tmp"; rm "$tmp")"
exit "$result"
From the options presented, I would go with the other answer ;) or with the xargs second snipped.
I am writing a simple script in bash to check whether or not a bunch of dependencies are installed on the current system. My script attempts to run a sample script with the -h flag, greps the output for a keyword i would expected to be returned by the sample scripts, and therefore knows whether or not the sample script is installed on the system.
I then pass this through a conditional statement that basically says sample scripts = OK or sample scripts = FAIL. However, in the case in which the sample script isn't installed on the system, bash throws the warning -bash: sample_script: command not found. How can I prevent this from displaying? I tried using the 1>&2 error redirection, but the warning still appears on the screen (I want the OK/FAIL output text to be displayed on the user's screen upon running my script).
Thanks for any suggestions!
If you just want to suppress errors (stderr) and let the "OK" or "FAIL" you are echoing (stdout) pass through, you would do:
./yourscript.sh 2> /dev/null
Although the better approach would be to test whether sample_script is executable before trying to execute it. For instance:
if [ -x "$script" ]; then
*do whatever generates FAIL or OK*
fi
#devnull dixit
command -h 2>/dev/null
I use this function to be independent of which, whence, type -p and whatnot:
pathto () {
DIRLIST=$(echo "$PATH"|tr : ' ')
for e in "$#"; do
for d in $DIRLIST; do
test -f "$d/$e" -a -x "$d/$e" && echo "$d/$e"
done
done
}
pathto script will echo the full path if it can be found (and is executable). Returning 0 or 1 instead left as an exercise :-)
for bash:
if ! type -P sample_script &> /dev/null; then
echo Error: sample_script is not installed. Come back later. >&2
exit 1
fi
sample_script "$#"
I am trying to beef up my notify script. The way the script works is that I put it behind a long running shell command and then all sorts of notifications get invoked after the long running script finished.
For example:
sleep 100; my_notify
It would be nice to get the exit code of the long running script. The problem is that calling my_notify creates a new process that does not have access to the $? variable.
Compare:
~ $: ls nonexisting_file; echo "exit code: $?"; echo "PPID: $PPID"
ls: nonexisting_file: No such file or directory
exit code: 1
PPID: 6203
vs.
~ $: ls nonexisting_file; my_notify
ls: nonexisting_file: No such file or directory
exit code: 0
PPID: 6205
The my_notify script has the following in it:
#!/bin/sh
echo "exit code: $?"
echo "PPID: $PPID"
I am looking for a way to get the exit code of the previous command without changing the structure of the command too much. I am aware of the fact that if I change it to work more like time, e.g. my_notify longrunning_command... my problem would be solved, but I actually like that I can tack it at the end of a command and I fear complications of this second solution.
Can this be done or is it fundamentally incompatible with the way that shells work?
My shell is Z shell (zsh), but I would like it to work with Bash as well.
You'd really need to use a shell function in order to accomplish that. For a simple script like that it should be pretty easy to have it working in both zsh and bash. Just place the following in a file:
my_notify() {
echo "exit code: $?"
echo "PPID: $PPID"
}
Then source that file from your shell startup files. Although since that would be run from within your interactive shell, you may want to use $$ rather than $PPID.
It is incompatible. $? only exists within the current shell; if you want it available in subprocesses then you must copy it to an environment variable.
The alternative is to write a shell function that uses it in some way instead.
One method to implement this could be to use EOF tag and a master script which will create your my_notify script.
#!/bin/bash
if [ -f my_notify ] ; then
rm -rf my_notify
fi
if [ -f my_temp ] ; then
rm -rf my_temp
fi
retval=`ls non_existent_file &> /dev/null ; echo $?`
ppid=$PPID
echo "retval=$retval"
echo "ppid=$ppid"
cat >> my_notify << 'EOF'
#!/bin/bash
echo "exit code: $retval"
echo " PPID =$ppid"
EOF
sh my_notify
You can refine this script for your purpose.
Suppose a shell script (/bin/sh or /bin/bash) contained several commands. How can I cleanly make the script terminate if any of the commands has a failing exit status? Obviously, one can use if blocks and/or callbacks, but is there a cleaner, more concise way? Using && is not really an option either, because the commands can be long, or the script could have non-trivial things like loops and conditionals.
With standard sh and bash, you can
set -e
It will
$ help set
...
-e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
It also works (from what I could gather) with zsh. It also should work for any Bourne shell descendant.
With csh/tcsh, you have to launch your script with #!/bin/csh -e
May be you could use:
$ <any_command> || exit 1
You can check $? to see what the most recent exit code is..
e.g
#!/bin/sh
# A Tidier approach
check_errs()
{
# Function. Parameter 1 is the return code
# Para. 2 is text to display on failure.
if [ "${1}" -ne "0" ]; then
echo "ERROR # ${1} : ${2}"
# as a bonus, make our script exit with the right error code.
exit ${1}
fi
}
### main script starts here ###
grep "^${1}:" /etc/passwd > /dev/null 2>&1
check_errs $? "User ${1} not found in /etc/passwd"
USERNAME=`grep "^${1}:" /etc/passwd|cut -d":" -f1`
check_errs $? "Cut returned an error"
echo "USERNAME: $USERNAME"
check_errs $? "echo returned an error - very strange!"