[ale] Re: Simple bash question

Brian Pitts brian at polibyte.com
Mon Jan 28 21:25:40 EST 2008


Doctor Who wrote:
>> Just curious how this might be accomplished with a bash script.  If
>> there was an error kicked back at any step, it would be nice to say as
>> such.

Some advice on the error checking. Create a bash function like

function error_exit {
     echo -e "scriptname.sh: $1" 1>&2
     exit 1
}

and then use the OR operator to run this if any command fails. For example

e2fsck -f -p /dev/sda1 || echo "$LINENO: Error $? encountered while 
checking linux filesystem, continuing anyway"
resize2fs -p /dev/sda1 || error_exit "$LINENO: Couldn't expand linux 
filesystem"

$LINENO is the current line number and $? is the exit status of the last 
command. I hope that helps.

-Brian



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