Why does this bash script not exit?

Question

Might be a basic question, but I'm not sure why logging would cause this exit function to not work as expected:

#!/bin/bash

function exitFunct
{
  exit 1
}

exitFunct  2>&1 | tee -a /var/tmp/output.txt
echo "You should never see this"

But output is "You should never see this"

choroba · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-23 23:40:42Z

6

As man bash explains,

Each command in a pipeline is executed as a separate process (i.e., in a subshell).

Therefore, the exit in the function exits just the subshell that runs the function's part of the pipeline.

And also,

The return status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, unless the pipefail option is enabled.

Therefore, you can change the behaviour by prepending

set -eo pipefail

to the script (-e makes your script stop on error). Nonetheless, note that using exit 0 wouldn't end it.

answered Nov 23, 2015 at 23:13

choroba

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2 Comments

Which means that the exit in the function is exiting the pipeline-spawned sub-shell and not the parent shell. (Just to make that point clear.)

@wizurd: If you don't want grep to end the script, handle the case in an or: grep ... || echo Nothing found