After designing a simple shell/bash based backup script on my Ubuntu engine and making it work, I've uploaded it to my Debian server, which outputs a number of errors while executing it.
What can I do to turn on "error handling" in my Ubuntu machine to make it easier to debug?
-v or -x or bothYou might also want to pipe the result of the bad command, particularly if run by cron(8), into /bin/logger, perhaps something like:
sh -v -x badscript 2>&1 | /bin/logger -t badscript
and then go look at /var/log/messages.
Bash lets you turn on debugging selectively, or completely with the set command. Here is a good reference on how to debug bash scripts.
The command set -x will turn on debugging anywhere in your script. Likewise, set +x will turn it off again. This is useful if you only want to see debug output from parts of your script.
Change your shebang line to include the trace option:
#!/bin/bash -x
You can also have Bash scan the file for errors without running it:
$ bash -n scriptname
