Setting the bash pipefail
option (via set -o pipefail
) allows the script to fail if a non-zero error is caught where there is a non-zero error in any step of a pipe.
However, we are running into SIGPIPE
errors (error code 141), where data is written to a pipe that no longer exists.
Is there a way to set bash to ignore SIGPIPE
errors, or is there an approach to writing an error handler that will handle all error status codes but, say, 0 and 141?
For instance, in Python, we can add:
signal.signal(signal.SIGPIPE, signal.SIG_DFL)
to apply the default behavior to SIGPIPE
errors: ignoring them (cf. http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Python/comp.lang.python/2004-06/3823.html).
Is there some similar option available in bash?
There isn't a way that I know of to do this for the whole script. It would be risky in general, since there's no way to know that a child process didn't return 141 for a different reason.
But you can do this on a per-command basis. The
||
operator suppresses any errors returned by the first command, so you can do something like:I handle this on a per-pipeline basis by tacking on an
|| if ...
statement to swallow exit code 141 but still bubbling up any other errors:The
trap
command lets you specify a command to run when encountering a signal. To ignore a signal, pass the empty string: