Bash Terminal – Prevent Terminal Window from Closing on Non-zero Exit Code

bashbashrcshell-scriptterminal

At first this was a bit funny, like playing "Bash Roulette"
…but now it's getting old lol

Any command in my terminal that exits with non-zero code closes my terminal window

I was told that perhaps I have set -e set in some bash script somewhere that my terminal sources.

I have checked .bash_profile / .bashrc / .profile and it doesn't look like set -e is in there.

Would there be any other obvious culprits?

Best Answer

Alright, so indeed, it was a wayward set -e that caused my trouble.

The way I found the set -e was using bash -lx

The best thing to do would be to use:

bash -lx > lx.log 2>&1

then open that log file and do a search for set...

once you find that wayward set -e you can remove that line and your problem should be gone! (Machine restart might be a good idea tho).

In my case, the set -e was in a file that .bash_profile sources, but the line was not in .bash_profile itself.

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Bash – When is /etc/bash.bashrc Invoked?

From Debian's bash README:

What is /etc/bash.bashrc? It doesn't seem to be documented.

The Debian version of bash is compiled with a special option (-DSYS_BASHRC) that makes bash read /etc/bash.bashrc before ~/.bashrc for interactive non-login shells. So, on Debian systems, /etc/bash.bashrc is to ~/.bashrc as /etc/profile is to ~/.bash_profile.

Bash – recover the .bash_profile from an open Terminal tab

If your terminal is still open, type env: it will display all your environment variables. If it's a fresh install or if you never made any change, the most important variables are PATH (this one always exist) and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (may not exists, I'm not used to osx).

For instance:

$ env
...
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/home/user/bin:/sbin
...

It's also a common thing to source .bashrc in that file.

Then you can edit your .bash_profile to add a line like this:

# Source your .bashrc
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
  source ~/.bashrc
fi

# Export the interesting env variables you
#   displayed from env command previously
export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/home/user/bin:/sbin

It's not a real solution since it's not a real "backup", but keep in mind that as long your terminal is open, you can know your environment variables, and main purpose of .bash_profile is to set those variables.

Also, you may have some aliases: in your opened terminal, type alias to display all the defined aliases. You can copy and paste the ouput as-is in your .bash_profile. (obviously, if those aliases are available in your .bashrc you don't need to define them in your .bash_profile since you source the .bashrc previously.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – When is /etc/bash.bashrc Invoked?

Bash – recover the .bash_profile from an open Terminal tab

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