Question

After designing a simple shell/bash based backup script on my Ubuntu engine and making it work, I’ve uploaded it to my Debian server, which outputs a number of errors while executing it.

What can I do to turn on “error handling” in my Ubuntu machine to make it easier to debug?

Answer 1

• ssh into the server
• run the script by hand with either -v or -x or both
• try to duplicate the user, group, and environment of the error run in your terminal window
  If necessary, run the program with something like “su -c ‘sh -v script’ otheruser

You might also want to pipe the result of the bad command, particularly if run by cron(8), into /bin/logger, perhaps something like:

sh -v -x badscript 2>&1 | /bin/logger -t badscript

and then go look at /var/log/messages.