Not successful if statements returning error code
Andrej Picej
andrej.picej at norik.com
Fri Jul 23 03:18:44 PDT 2021
Hi all,
I have a question about Hush shell and the use of its conditional
statements.
We have come upon an interesting behaviour with its return values.
If the condition of the if statement is not true then the return value
is 1 (error code), and if the condition is true the return value is 0
(success).
Simple test:
> #!/bin/sh
> if [ 0 -gt 1 ]; then
> echo "0 gt 1, Ret: $?"
> fi
> echo "Ret: $?"
>
> if [ 2 -gt 1 ]; then
> echo "2 gt 1, Ret: $?"
> fi
> echo "Ret: $?"
Output:
> Ret: 1
> 2 gt 1, Ret: 0
> Ret: 0
This means that if, for example the first if statement (where condition
is not met) would be at the end of a script the return value of that
whole script would be 1 (error code).
I don't think this follows standard shell behaviour. If if statement
condition is not met this doesn't mean that the return value should be
an error code, right?
Using other shells (bash for example) we can see that the returned value
in both cases is 0, which is expected (IMO).
This behaviour is not new to the Hush or barebox as I could reproduce it
on various previous barebox versions (2013.08.0, 2017.12.0 and 2019.11.0).
Of course, this problem can be easily avoided if at the end of every
script we use explicit exit 0. This is doable, but a little annoying.
Although this is not a deal-breaker for us, I was wondering what is the
reason behind this? How do you get around this and are there any plans
to fix/modify this in the future so it follows the behaviour of other
shells?
Thank you for your answer.
Best regards,
Andrej
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