Bash-gotchas

Oddball things to remember when working in bash..

• Exit codes are not always honored in function calls when it is inline

f() {
echo "test"; exit 2
}
f() {
echo "test"
exit 2
}

• Breaking out of a function early can be a PITA

f() {
foo=yes
if [[ ${foo} = 'yes' ]]; then
  echo "blah"
  return 0
elif [[ $foo = 'no ]]; then
  echo "barf"
  return 1
else
  echo "baz"
fi
curl https//some.url
}

• Eval can be useful to pull vars out of a function

danger() { danger="$*"; passback danger; }
eval `danger '; /bin/echo *'`
echo "$danger"

• Lazy scripting can or will cause errs:

unset FOO
$ echo "$FOO"

$ echo "1$FOO1"
1
$ echo "1${FOO}1"
11
$ FOO=bar
$ echo "1${FOO}1"
1bar1
$ echo "1$FOO1"
1