How to exit if a command failed?

Question

I am a noob in shell-scripting. I want to print a message and exit my script if a command fails. I've tried:

my_command && (echo 'my_command failed; exit)

but it does not work. It keeps executing the instructions following this line in the script. I'm using Ubuntu and bash.

Answer 1

For error proofing your commands:

execute [INVOKING-FUNCTION] [COMMAND]

---

execute () {
    error=$($2 2>&1 >/dev/null)

    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "$1: $error"
        exit 1
    fi
}

---

Inspired in Lean manufacturing:

• Make errors impossible by design
• Make steps the smallest
• Finish items one by one
• Make it obvious to anyone

Answer 2

The other answers have covered the direct question well, but you may also be interested in using set -e. With that, any command that fails (outside of specific contexts like if tests) will cause the script to abort. For certain scripts, it's very useful.

Answer 3

You can also use, if you want to preserve exit error status, and have a readable file with one command per line:

my_command1 || exit $?
my_command2 || exit $?

This, however will not print any additional error message. But in some cases, the error will be printed by the failed command anyway.

Answer 4

If you want that behavior for all commands in your script, just add

  set -e 
  set -o pipefail

at the beginning of the script. This pair of options tell the bash interpreter to exit whenever a command returns with a non-zero exit code.

This does not allow you to print an exit message, though.

Answer 5

I've hacked up the following idiom:

echo "Generating from IDL..."
idlj -fclient -td java/src echo.idl
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then { echo "Failed, aborting." ; exit 1; } fi

echo "Compiling classes..."
javac *java
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then { echo "Failed, aborting." ; exit 1; } fi

echo "Done."

Precede each command with an informative echo, and follow each command with that same
if [ $? -ne 0 ];... line. (Of course, you can edit that error message if you want to.)

Answer 6

Note also, each command's exit status is stored in the shell variable $?, which you can check immediately after running the command. A non-zero status indicates failure:

my_command
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "it worked"
else
    echo "it failed"
fi