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What does set -e mean in a bash script?
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Closed 6 years ago.
In a bash script what is the use of
set -e
?
I expect it has something to do with environment variables but I have not come across it before
quoting from help set
-e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
i.e the script or shell would exit as soon as it encounters any command that exited with a non-0(failure) exit code.
Any command that fails would result in the shell exiting immediately.
As an example:
Open up a terminal and type the following:
$ set -e
$ grep abcd <<< "abc"
As soon you hit enter after grep command, the shell exits because grep exited with a non-0 status i.e it couldn't find regex abcd in text abc
Note: to unset this behavior use set +e.
man bash says
Exit immediately if a simple command (see SHELL GRAMMAR above) exits with a non-zero
status. 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 !. A
trap on ERR, if set, is executed before the shell exits.
It is super convenient way to get "fail-fast" behaviour if you want to avoid testing the return code of every command in a bash script.
Suppose there is no file named trumpet in the current directory below script :
#!/bin/bash
# demonstrates set -e
# set -e means exit immediately if a command exited with a non zero status
set -e
ls trumpet #no such file so $? is non-zero, hence the script aborts here
# you still get ls: cannot access trumpet: No such file or directory
echo "some other stuff" # will never be executed.
You may also combine the e with the x option like set -ex where :
-x Print commands and their arguments as they are executed.
This may help you debugging bash scripts.
Reference:Set Manpage
Related
In shell scripts set -e is often used to make them more robust by stopping the script when some of the commands executed from the script exits with non-zero exit code. I am confused about "set -e" and "test" commands, the result is contrary to what I want.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
a=10
b=9
#test $a -lt $b && false
#test $a -gt $b && false
echo "111"
The real result is:
if a > b, print nothing
if a < b, print 111.
but i don't think so, i think the result is nothing whatever happened.
If you want to exit when a is greater than b, just write
#!/bin/bash
set -e
a=10
b=9
test $a -le $b
echo "111"
If test fails, set -e will cause the script to exit; if it succeeds, the script continues to echo. However, there are many pitfalls to using set -e; I recommend just doing your own error handling.
#!/bin/bash
abort () { printf '%s\n' >&2; exit 1; }
a=10
b=9
test "$a" -le "$b" || abort "$a is greater than $b"
echo "111"
The way you wrote your script means, it will exit without printing anything in all situation BUT if a and b are equals.
If you try with a = 9 and b = 9, you will see the 111 output.
You can easily all the behaviour, using the -x option of GNU/Bash.
The explanation of the exit, is your use of -e option; you can read this in GNU/Bash manual:
Exit immediately if a pipeline (see Pipelines), which may consist of a single simple command (see Simple Commands), a list (see Lists), or a compound command (see Compound Commands) returns a non-zero status. 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 any command executed in a && or || list except the command following the final && or ||, any command in a pipeline but the last, or if the command’s return status is being inverted with !. If a compound command other than a subshell returns a non-zero status because a command failed while -e was being ignored, the shell does not exit. A trap on ERR, if set, is executed before the shell exits.
This option applies to the shell environment and each subshell environment separately (see Command Execution Environment), and may cause subshells to exit before executing all the commands in the subshell.
If a compound command or shell function executes in a context where -e is being ignored, none of the commands executed within the compound command or function body will be affected by the -e setting, even if -e is set and a command returns a failure status. If a compound command or shell function sets -e while executing in a context where -e is ignored, that setting will not have any effect until the compound command or the command containing the function call completes.
Thanks everyone, i find the answer which is
SHELL Exit immediately if a pipeline (which may consist of a single simple com-mand), a list, or a compound command (see SHELL GRAMMAR above), exits with a non-zero status. 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 following the if or elif reserved words, part of any command executed in a && or || list except the command following the final && or ||, any command in a pipeline but the last, or if the command's return value is being inverted with !.
If in a script I use set -e the script continues after an error has occurred in a statement that executes two commands with &&.
For example:
set -e
cd nonexistingdirectory && echo "&&"
echo continue
This gives the following output:
./exit.sh: line 3: cd: nonexistingdirectory: No such file or directory
continue
I want the script to exit after cd nonexistingdirectory and stop.
How can I do this?
** Edit**
I have multiple scripts using && that I need to fix to make sure they exit upon error. But I want a minimum impact/risk solution. I will try the solution mentioned in the comments to replace && with ; combined with set -e.
This is by design. If you use &&, bash assumes you want to handle errors yourself, so it doesn't abort on failure in the first command.
Possible fix:
set -e
cd nonexistingdirectory
echo "&&"
echo continue
Now there are only two possibilities:
cd succeeds and the script continues as usual.
cd fails and bash aborts execution because of set -e.
The problem here is your && command.
In fact, when a command that retrieves error is executed together (&&) with another command, the set -e doesn't work.
If you explain better the real use case we could find out a work around that fits your needs.
set [+abefhkmnptuvxBCEHPT] [+o option] [arg ...]
-e Exit immediately if a pipeline (which may consist of a single simple command), a subshell command enclosed in parentheses, or
one of the commands executed as part of a command list enclosed by braces (see SHELL GRAMMAR above) exits with a non-zero status.
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 following the if or elif reserved words, part of any command executed in a && or || list except the command fol-
lowing the final && or ||, any command in a pipeline but the last, or if the command's return value is being inverted with !.
from man bash
I am running my scripts with:
#!/bin/bash -eu
Which aborts the script whenever a problem occurs, as wanted. But sometimes I expect one of the commands to eventually fail, and I would like to tell bash to ignore the fail condition. In make you can ignore the status of one command with the handy:
-command
Is there something similar in bash? The only thing that comes to mind is the ugly:
set +e
command
set -e
You could just do a no-op on the command failure or set an explicit true condition as
command || true
or for no-op as
command || :
Doing so forces the command-list (even a pipeline) to return an exit status of 0 on failure. See
true | false
echo $?
1
true | false || true
echo $?
0
true | false || :
echo $?
0
Just prepend a ! to the command so that its exit status does not make the script exit when running it with e:
! command
As seen in What's the meaning of a ! before a command in the shell?, having ! command negates the exit status of the given command and, used with set -e, prevents the shell to exit whatever the exit result is on that line.
From Bash Reference Manual → Pipelines:
Each command in a pipeline is executed in its own subshell. The exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command in the pipeline (...). If the reserved word ‘!’ precedes the pipeline, the exit status is the logical negation of the exit status as described above. The shell waits for all commands in the pipeline to terminate before returning a value.
Then we have the info about 4.3.1 The set Builtin:
-e
Exit immediately if a pipeline (see Pipelines), which may consist of a single simple command (see Simple Commands), a list (see Lists), or a compound command (see Compound Commands) returns a non-zero status. The shell does not exit if the command that fails is part of the command list immediately following a while or until keyword, part of the test in an if statement, part of any command executed in a && or || list except the command following the final && or ||, any command in a pipeline but the last, or if the command’s return status is being inverted with !.
All together, and quoting my own answer:
When you have:
set -e
! command1
command2
What you are doing is to by-pass the set -e flag in the command1.
Why?
if command1 runs properly, it will return a zero status. ! will negate it, but set -e won't trigger an exit by the because it comes
from a return status inverted with !, as described above.
if command1 fails, it will return a non-zero status. ! will negate it, so the line will end up returning a zero status and the
script will continue normally.
Don't think there is
Could just write your own function though
#!/bin/bash -eu
-(){
set +e
"$#"
set -e
}
- command
echo got here
May want to use a function name since - is already used in bash.
As chepner pointed out it only works for simple commands, though, not pipelines or lists.
Suppose I'm using a shell like bash or zsh, and also suppose that I have a command which writes to stdout. I want to capture the output of the command into a shell variable, and also to capture the command's return code into another shell variable.
I know I can do something like this ...
command >tempfile
rc=$?
output=$(cat tempfile)
Then, I have the return code in the 'rc' shell variable and the command's output in the 'output' shell variable.
However, I want to do this without using any temporary files.
Also, I could do this to get the command output ...
output=$(command)
... but then, I don't know how to get the command's return code into any shell variable.
Can anyone suggest a way to get both the return code and the command's output into two shell variables without using any files?
Thank you very much.
Just capture $? as you did before. Using the executables true and false, we can demonstrate that command substitution does set a proper return code:
$ output=$(true); rc=$?; echo $rc
0
$ output=$(false); rc=$?; echo $rc
1
Multiple command substitutions in one assignment
If more than one command substitution appears in an assignment, the return code of the last command substitution determines the return code of the assignment:
$ output="$(true) $(false)"; rc=$?; echo $rc
1
$ output="$(false) $(true)"; rc=$?; echo $rc
0
Documentation
From the section of man bash describing variable assignment:
If one of the expansions contained a command substitution, the exit
status of the command is the exit status of the last command
substitution performed. If there were no command substitutions, the
command exits with a status of zero.
Editing this post, original is at bottom beneath the "Thanks!"
command='a.out arg1 arg2 &'
eval ${command}
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
printf "Command \'${command}\' failed\n"
exit 1
fi
wait
Here is a test script that demonstrates the problem, which I oversimplified
in the original post. Notice the ampersand in line 2 and the wait command.
These more faithfully represent my script. In case it matters, the ampersand
is sometimes there and sometimes not, its presence is determined by a user-
specified flag that indicates whether or not to background a long arithmetic
calculation. And, also in case it matters, I'm actually backgrounding many
(twelve) processes, i.e., ${command[0..11]}. I want the script to die if any
fail. I use 'wait' to synchronize the successful return of all processes.
Happy (sort of) to use another approach but this almost works.
The ampersand (for backgrounding) seems to cause the problem.
When ${command} omits the ampersand, the script runs as expected:
The executable a.out is not found, a complaint to that effect is issued,
and $? is non-zero so the host script exits. When ${command} includes
the ampersand, the same complaint is issued but $? is zero so the
script continues to execute. I want the script to die immediately when
a.out fails but how do I obtain the non-zero return value from a
backgrounded process?
Thanks!
(original post):
I have a bash script that uses commands of the form
eval ${command}
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
printf "Command ${command} failed"
exit 1
fi
where ${command} is a string of words, e.g., "a.out arg1 ... argn".
The problem is that the return code from eval (i.e., $?) is always
zero even when ${command} fails. Removing the "eval" from the above
snippet allows the correct return code ($?) to be returned and thus
halt the script. I need to keep my command string in a variable
(${command}) in order to manipulate it elsewhere, and simply running
${command} without the eval doesn't work well for other reasons. How do I catch the
correct return code when using eval?
Thanks!
Charlie
The ampersand (for backgrounding) seems to cause the problem.
That is correct.
The shell cannot know a command's exit code until the command completes. When you put a command in background, the shell does not wait for completion. Hence, it cannot know the (future) return status of the command in background.
This is documented in man bash:
If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell
executes the command in the background in a subshell. The shell does
not wait for the command to finish, and the return status is 0.
In other words, the return code after putting a command in background is always 0 because the shell cannot predict the future return code of a command that has not yet completed.
If you want to find the return status of commands in the background, you need to use the wait command.
Examples
The command false always sets a return status of 1:
$ false ; echo status=$?
status=1
Observe, though, what happens if we background it:
$ false & echo status=$?
[1] 4051
status=0
The status is 0 because the command was put in background and the shell cannot predict its future exit code. If we wait a few moments, we will see:
$
[1]+ Exit 1 false
Here, the shell is notifying us that the brackground task completed and its return status was just as it should be: 1.
In the above, we did not use eval. If we do, nothing changes:
$ eval 'false &' ; echo status=$?
[1] 4094
status=0
$
[1]+ Exit 1 false
If you do want the return status of a backgrounded command, use wait. For example, this shows how to capture the return status of false:
$ false & wait $!; echo status=$?
[1] 4613
[1]+ Exit 1 false
status=1
From the man page on my system:
eval [arg ...] The args are read and concatenated together into a single command. This command is then read and executed by the shell, and its exit status is returned as the value of eval. If there are no args, or only null arguments, eval returns 0.
If your system documentation is 'the same', then, most likely, whatever commands you are running are the problem, i.e. 'a.out' is returning '0' on exit instead of a non-zero value. Add appropriate 'exit return code' to your compiled program.
You might also try using $() which will 'run' your binary instead of 'evaluating' it..., i.e.
STATUS=$(a.out var var var)
As long on only one 'command' is in the stream, then the value of $? is the 'exit code'; otherwise, $? is the return code for the last command in a multi-command 'pipe'...
:)
Dale