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I was reading an oriley bash scripting book, and they had an entire chapter dedicated to error checking in bash.  For me, this was a little weird since I think the way they handled it made the code cluttered.

They have cascaded statements like

if [ $ -ne 0 ]; then
#handle error
elif…

For me, this is strange.  I think in a bourne shell, the best way is to just set the -e flag, which according to the man page

-e errexit       If not interactive, exit immediately if any untested
command fails.  The exit status of a command is con‐
sidered to be explicitly tested if the command is
used to control an if, elif, while, or until; or if
the command is the left hand operand of an “&&” or
“||” operator.

This can be accomblished by

set -e

in your script.

Error handling is a balancing act between doing too much and handling everything (thus making the code unreadable) and not checking enough.  Normally, if I need much more error checking than that, time to pull out the python.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 08:11 and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.