Bash set +x without it being printed

Question

Does anyone know if we can say set +x in bash without it being printed:

set -x
command
set +x

traces

+ command         


        

Answer 1

I hacked up a solution to this just recently when I became annoyed with it:

shopt -s expand_aliases
_xtrace() {
    case $1 in
        on) set -x ;;
        off) set +x ;;
    esac
}
alias xtrace='{ _xtrace $(cat); } 2>/dev/null <<<'

This allows you to enable and disable xtrace as in the following, where I'm logging how the arguments are assigned to variables:

xtrace on
ARG1=$1
ARG2=$2
xtrace off

And you get output that looks like:

$ ./script.sh one two
+ ARG1=one
+ ARG2=two