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I understand that people generally use grep in Linux command prompt (not in a script). I happen to put grep in a script and run into a strange case. If the grep command returns nothing, the next line echo does not work. Below is the script.
grep "abc" /home/testuser/myapp.log
echo "abc"
Is this the normal behavior of grep? If yes, why?
It would appear that set -e is enabled in your script.
Normally the exit status of grep is 0 if a line is selected, 1 if no lines were selected, and 2 if an error occurred. Note however, if the -q or –quiet or –silent is used and a line is selected, the exit status is 0 even if an error occurred. In your case, if abc is not found in /home/testuser/myapp.log, grep will return 1.
The bash shell will normally execute the next line in your script, i.e. echo "abc" even if grep returns an exit status of 1. However if set -e is enabled, bash will not execute any more lines in your script.
From the bash manpage:
-e Exit immediately if a pipeline (which may consist of a single simple command), a list, or a compound command
(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 !. If a
compound command other than a subshell returns a non-zero status because a command failed while -e was being
ignored, the shell does not exit. A trap on ERR, if set, is executed before the shell exits. This option ap‐
plies to the shell environment and each subshell environment separately (see COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT
above), and may cause subshells to exit before executing all the commands in the subshell.
If a compound command or shell function executes in a context where -e is being ignored, none of the commands
executed within the compound command or function body will be affected by the -e setting, even if -e is set and
a command returns a failure status. If a compound command or shell function sets -e while executing in a con‐
text where -e is ignored, that setting will not have any effect until the compound command or the command con‐
taining the function call completes.
You can use the following command to echo with grep:
printf "%s\n" "$(grep -o "abc" /home/testuser/myapp.log)"
What did you mean by “the next line echo does not work“? Is the echo not reached at all? Does it run but yield a non-zero exit code? Or do you see abc on the output? Knowing your script will return nothing for the grep, and knowing nothing else about the rest of the script, I can say that the script will output nothing on stdout for the grep command and abc on stdout for the echo.