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Comment by memco | Hacker News Reader

Good stuff! I use set-x frequently and have used a similar thing to die (but Julia’s version is nicer). I’ll consider using the debugger thing but stepping through a bash script line by line sounds a bit tedious. Perhaps less so than having to reread a log and rerun the script a bunch.

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I often add a fail-unless function:

    fail-unless() {
      local result
      "$@"
      result=$?

      if ((result != 0)); then
        echo >2&1 "Failed  ${result} with command '$*'."
        exit ${result}
      fi
    }

That way, I know exactly what failed in the script.

How does this work exactly? What calls that function and when?

You do e.g. `fail-unless somecommand`. The result (exit/return code) is captured in the function and based on that, the function logs and exits or not.

You probably meant to reply to BeefySwain, right?

The line-by-line debugging would probably only be useful for a particular section of your script that you're trying to fix. In that case, you can remove the trap at the end of it with `trap - DEBUG`

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