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.

This is the sixth epidose of a small series.

Description:

Every command in a script may fail due to external reasons. Bash programming is not functional programming! 🙂

After running a command, make sure that you check the exit code and either raise a warning or exit with an error, depending on how a failure can impact the execution of the script.

BAD:

The worst example is not to check the exit code at all:

Next one is better, but you may have a lot of additional code to type:

Again, Log_Close, eok, eerror, etc are functions defined using the previous Bash Tips & Tricks in this series.

GOOD:

Define once the check functions that you will use after every command:

This is the fifth epidose of a small series.

Description:

Logging the output of the scripts to a file is very important. There are several ways to achieve it, I will just show one of my favorites.

BAD:

You can log badly either from the script to a log file:

or by redirecting badly the standard output of the script:

 GOOD:

My favorite solution is to automatically open a pipe that will receive from the standard output and redirect to the logfile. With this solution, I can programmatically define my logfile name inside the script (based on the script name and input parameters for example) and forget about redirecting the output everytime that I run a command.

(*) the functions edebug, einfo, etc, have to be created using the guidelines I have used in this post: Bash tips & tricks [ep. 4]: Use logging levels

The -Z parameter can be used to intentionally avoid logging.

Again, all this stuff (function definitions and variables) should be put in a global include file.

If I execute it:

This is the fourth epidose of a small series.

Description:

Support different logging levels natively in your scripts so that your code will be more stable and maintainable.

BAD:

 GOOD:

Nothing to invent, there are already a few blog posts around about the best practices for log messages. I personally like the one from Michael Wayne Goodman:

http://www.goodmami.org/2011/07/04/Simple-logging-in-BASH-scripts.html

I have reused his code in my scripts with very few modifications to fit my needs:

The edumpvar is handy to have the status of several variables at once:

If you couple the verbosity level with input parameters you can have something quite clever (e.g. -s for silent, -V for verbose, -G for debug). I’m putting everything into one single snippet just as example, but as you can imagine, you should seriously put all the fixed variables and functions inside an external file that you will systematically include in your scripts:

Example:

It does not take into account the output file. That will be part of the next tip 🙂

This is the third epidose of a small series.

Description:

The days of monochrome green-on-black screens are over, in a remote shell  terminal you can have something fancier!

BAD:

GOOD:

Define a series of variables as shortcuts for color escape codes, there are plenty of examples on internet.

Use them whenever you need to highlight the output of a script, and eventually integrate them in a smart prompt (like the one I’ve blogged about sometimes ago).

The echo builtin command requires -e in order to make the colours work. When reading files, cat works, less requires -r. vi may work with some hacking, but it’s not worth to spend too much time, IMHO.

This is the second epidose of a small series.

Description:

The main technical account (oracle here) usually has the smart environment, with aliases, scripts avilable at fingertips, correct environment variables and functions.

When working with personal accounts, it may be boring to set the new environment at each login, copy it from a golden copy or reinvent the wheel everytime.

BAD:

GOOD:

Distribute a standard .bash_profile that calls a central profile script valid for all the users:

Make your common environment as smart as possible. If any commands need to be run differently depending on the user (oracle or not oracle), just use a simple if:

The goal of course is to avoid as many types as you can, and let all your colleagues profit of the smart environment.