UNIX tip of the day – trap EXIT

I was reading a shell script today and came across the trap command, which I was not aware of. Some googling led me to this article: How “Exit Traps” Can Make Your Bash Scripts Way MoreRobust And Reliable , which has a really nice explanation. Basically, trap acts sort of like a finally block in a try/catch pattern. Very useful for shutting down services, cleaning up temp files and such. I think that trap is specific to BASH, so you can’t use it with plain old Bourne shell, but just about every UNIX has BASH nowadays, so I don’t think it is a problem.

UNIX tip of the day – trap EXIT

Like this:

Archives

Category