Re: Documentation discrepancy

[Chet Ramey]

Mitar wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have found a discrepancy between documentation (man page) and
> behavior of Bash under -e switch. In documentation it is written:
> 
> The shell does not exit if the command that fails is part of the
> command list immediately following a while or until keyword, part of
> the test in an if statement, part of a && or || list, or if the
> command's return value is being inverted via !.

The language in the man page is pretty much straight out of Posix, but
the bash-3.2 behavior does differ.  Historical shell behavior and
implementor consensus are that the failure of the rightmost command in
an AND or OR list should cause the shell to exit.

The language in the bash-4.0 man page documents the behavior:

        Exit immediately if a pipeline (which may consist  of  a
        single  simple command),  a subshell command enclosed in
        parentheses, or one of the commands executed as part  of
        a  command  list  enclosed  by braces (see SHELL GRAMMAR
        above) exits with a non-zero status.  The shell does not
        exit  if  the  command that fails is part of the command
        list immediately following a  while  or  until  keyword,
        part  of  the  test  following  the  if or elif reserved
        words, part of any command executed in a && or  ||  list
        except  the  command  following  the final && or ||, any
        command in a pipeline but the last, or if the  command's
        return  value  is being inverted with !.


Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer

Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/