4 comments

  • moebrowne 6 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 6 hours ago
      I agree, the moment bash script needs "if" statement, you are using wrong language.
      • frou_dh 4 hours ago
        Is that so? Sounds like this commandment has a lot of authority, I'd better start following it.
        • cousinbryce 36 minutes ago
          You’re free to program in language with only one data type all you want!
    • vdm 8 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 8 hours ago
        Oops, pretty sure I meant a regular variable. Will modify the post, thanks for pointing this out.
      • hks0 7 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 3 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.