PERL: Trapping EXIT

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hey Everyone,

Just starting with PERL (5.8.2) after years of KSH. Is there a way to trap the exit as you can in KSH (i.e., "trap EXIT_SCRIPT EXIT")?

Thanks in advance for any help,
gsatch

2

Don't think of it so much as "trap", but as a signal handler. Perl uses a simple signal handling model: the %SIG hash contains names or references of user-installed signal handlers. These handlers will be called with an argument which is the name of the signal that triggered it.

For example, catch an interrupt and exit with a nasty message:

$SIG{INT} = sub { die "\nWhy'd you interrupt what I'm doing?\n" };

You can call functions etc.

Cheers,

Keith

3

Thanks for the reply, Keith. The 'trap' in KSH allows a section of code to be ran everytime the script exits (the exception may be when it's killed via "kill -9"), allowing for the script to clean-up (i.e., remove temp. files, etc...) after itself. It's pretty broad where $SIG in PERL is more specific but, I could achieve the same thing if I trapped all of the appropriate signals and sent them all to the same block of code.

Thanks again Keith,
Greg

4

FYI, if you need to trap normal exit (including die()s, not triggered by OS signals), you may be able to use an END {} block, which is best for normal cleanups.

5

for some reason i'm not getting notified of updates to this thread so I just found this ...

cbkihong - looks to be EXACTLY what I'm looking for! I've done some simple testing and it's doing what I was hoping. Thanks for the reply.

Greg