Bash tips & tricks [ep. 7]: Cleanup on EXIT with a trap

This is the seventh epidose of a small series.

Description:

Pipes, temporary files, lock files, processes spawned in background, rows inserted in a status table that need to be updated… Everything need to be cleaned up if the script exits, even when the exit condition is not triggered inside the script.

BAD:

The worst practice is, of course, to forget to cleanup the tempfiles, leaving my output and temporary directories full of files *.tmp, *.pipe, *.lck, etc. I will not show the code because the list of bad practices is quite long…

Better than forgiving to cleanup, but still very bad, is to cleanup everything just before triggering the exit command (in the following example, F_check_exit is a function that exits the script if the first argument is non-zero, as defined it in the previous episode):

A better approach, would be to put all the cleanup tasks in a Cleanup()  function and then call this function instead of duplicating all the code everywhere:

But still, I need to make sure that I insert this piece of code everywhere. Not optimal yet.

I may include the Cleanup function inside the F_check_exit function, but then I have two inconvenients:
1 – I need to define the Cleanup function in every script that includes my include file
2 – still there will be exit conditions that are not trapped

GOOD:

The good approach would be to trap the EXIT signal with the Cleanup function:

Much better! But what if my include script has some logic that also creates some temporary files?

I can create a global F_Cleanup function that eventually executes the local Cleanup function, if defined. Let me show this:

Include script:

Main script:

The Cleanup function will be executed only if defined.

No Cleanup function: no worries, but still the F_Cleanup function can do some global cleanup not specific to the main script.

The following two tabs change content below.

Ludovico

Principal Product Manager at Oracle
Ludovico is a member of the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability & Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Product Management team in Oracle. He focuses on Oracle Data Guard, Flashback technologies, and Cloud MAA.

One thought on “Bash tips & tricks [ep. 7]: Cleanup on EXIT with a trap

  1. Pingback: Bash tips & tricks [ep. 7]: Cleanup on EXIT with a trap - Ludovico Caldara - Blogs - triBLOG

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.