In a Bash script, how can I exit the entire script if a certain condition occurs?

Question

I\'m writing a script in Bash to test some code. However, it seems silly to run the tests if compiling the code fails in the first place, in which case I\'ll just abort the

Answer 1

Use set -e

#!/bin/bash

set -e

/bin/command-that-fails
/bin/command-that-fails2

The script will terminate after the first line that fails (returns nonzero exit code). In this case, command-that-fails2 will not run.

If you were to check the return status of every single command, your script would look like this:

#!/bin/bash

# I'm assuming you're using make

cd /project-dir
make
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]] ; then
    exit 1
fi

cd /project-dir2
make
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]] ; then
    exit 1
fi

With set -e it would look like:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

cd /project-dir
make

cd /project-dir2
make

Any command that fails will cause the entire script to fail and return an exit status you can check with $?. If your script is very long or you're building a lot of stuff it's going to get pretty ugly if you add return status checks everywhere.