Test with non-zero status does not exit shell

chebarbudo · February 19, 2016, 10:58am

Hi there,

I'm very used to use

set -e

to break my scripts if any command exits with a non-zero status.

As a policy, I'm willingly expecting

echo hello | grep a

to break the script.

The commands

test 1 -eq $1 && echo hello

exits with a non-zero status if $1 is not 1. BUT... It doesn't break the script.

Does anyone know why?

Cheers
Santiago

cero · February 19, 2016, 11:25am

My man page tells me this:

man bash:

...
-e Exit immediately if a pipeline (which may consist of a
single simple command), a list, or a compound command
(see SHELL GRAMMAR above), exits with a non-zero sta�
tus. The shell does not exit if the command that fails
is part of the command list immediately following a
while or until keyword, part of the test following the
if or elif reserved words, part of any command executed
in a && or || list except the command following the
final && or ||, any command in a pipeline but the last,
or if the command's return value is being inverted with
!. If a compound command other than a subshell returns
a non-zero status because a command failed while -e was
being ignored, the shell does not exit. A trap on ERR,
if set, is executed before the shell exits. This option
applies to the shell environment and each subshell envi�
ronment separately (see COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT
above), and may cause subshells to exit before executing
all the commands in the subshell.

...

chebarbudo · February 19, 2016, 1:12pm

Much clearer.
The output of help set did not give me that much information.
Thanks for your help.