Debug in bash

To run bash scripts in a safer way, here are some tips and usage patterns to debug bash scripts.

command line options

bash -x ## debug
bash -n ## test syntax

set options

• set -e exit immediately when a command fails
• set -u view undefined variable as error
• set -x run in debug mode
• set -o pipefail This tells the script that if any of the steps (not in a block construction) fail (exit with non-zero), the whole script should halt in place and the script will exit with the failure message of the failed step.

Put them together

set -euxo pipefail