I have written a shell script and I am using few commands like rm, ls, etc. In case where those commands fails , I am checking the return status '$?' . But If the script has some syntax error, how can I get the error status of it ? Basically I am going to source this script from another script using the 'source' command. So if the script which is sourced has any syntax error I want to display that in console. Is there any way to get that status ? In shell I executed the script with syntax error and I got the error like 'missing [' , but when I executed echo $? its returning 0 as the status, is this the behavior ? How can I get the status if the script has some syntax error or not ?
1 Answer
You can check the syntax of a shell script using the -n option prior to sourcing:
bash -n somescript # Works also for sh, ksh, zsh et al.
will tell you if somescript is syntactically okay without actually running it. In a program:
if bash -n somescript; then
. somescript
else
printf '%s\n' "Uh-oh, somescript is not syntactically correct." >&2
fi
sourceexecutes the commands of another script in the context of the current shell, so you get statuses of commands. If you want to see the sh/bash exit status, usesh script; echo $?ret=$?; [ $ret -eq 0 ] || exit $ret#!/bin/bash -e. It will then stop on error.