4 comments

  • moebrowne 8 hours ago

    I believe that Bash scripts should be trivially short and simple. As soon as any complexity is introduced they should be written in another language.

    • general1465 8 hours ago

      I agree, the moment bash script needs "if" statement, you are using wrong language.

      • frou_dh 6 hours ago

        Is that so? Sounds like this commandment has a lot of authority, I'd better start following it.

        • cousinbryce 2 hours ago

          You’re free to program in language with only one data type all you want!

  • vdm 10 hours ago

    > We can assign the value of $? to an environment variable

    exit_code is not an environment variable?

    https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Shell-Par...

    • Meetvelde 10 hours ago

      Oops, pretty sure I meant a regular variable. Will modify the post, thanks for pointing this out.

    • hks0 9 hours ago

      I declare a `my_die() { echo "$" 1>&2; exit 1; }` on top of each file. Makes life easier by knowing why the script failed instead of having only exit code or having to turn `set -x` on and rerun.

      Only if I could somehow mix `if` & `set -e`in a readable way... I wanted it to only capture errors of explicit `return 1` from bash functions, not from commands within those bash functions. But I guess I'm doing too much* of the job in bash now and it's getting messy.

      • burnt-resistor 5 hours ago

            #!/usr/bin/env bash
            set -eEuo pipefail # pipefail bash 4.2+, which is basically everything. There's a longer version for backwards compatibility, but it's rare.
        
            die() {
              echo >&2 "ERROR: $*"
              exit 1
            } 
        
            # e= & exit preserves the original exit code
            # trap - ... prevents multiple cleanup() calls
            # To only run on error instead of always, replace both EXITs with ERR
            trap 'e=$?; trap - EXIT; cleanup; exit $e' EXIT
            cleanup() {
              : # Delete this line and place cleanup code here.
            }
        
            # Minimal script here.
            # Use semantic-named functions.
            # DRY.
            # Don't use many levels of indentation.
            # All ordinary variables must be defined before use, so use checks like [[ -n "${X-}" ]]
            # All pipeline and bare command non-zero exit codes are errors.