Bash exec wrapper script - multiple commands passed in as arguments

Question

Essentially I have a script which acts as a task wrapper and emails a user if the task fails.

The task is passed in as an argument to the script. The problem comes when we need to run multiple commands say the following line is passed to the script as the task arg "echo this; echo that" would output this; echo that.

So the question is what is the easiest way to run multiple commands without having to loop through the input command string and split on the ';' char?

Simple example:

FIRST=$1
TASK=$*
echo run
echo "emailing $FIRST"
$TASK
echo done

and to run this script we would use ./wrapper.sh "[email protected]" "echo this; echo that"

Suggestions?

sarnold · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-26 00:34:12Z

7

If you execute the string $TASK via sh -c, you might not need to do any more work:

$ sh -c "echo this ; echo that"
this
that
$

answered Mar 26, 2012 at 0:34

sarnold

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2 Comments

NightWolf Over a year ago

Thanks - is there anyway to get the return value if any command in the command string fails. Say "echo this; dsddsdsd; echo that", the middle command will fail (not found) yet $? will still be 0 as echo succeeds. So the question is using sh I can halt on failure with the -e switch but can I run through each command to return any non-zero errors (Im guessing no but worth a shot).

sarnold Over a year ago

Hrm, I cannot think of any easy mechanism to do that; can you instead change your script to accept multiple commands as multiple arguments? e.g. wrapper.sh alert@hostname "echo this" "echo that"?

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