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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T22:31:54+00:00

Context: I have a bash script that contains a subshell and a trap for

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Context:

I have a bash script that contains a subshell and a trap for the EXIT pseudosignal, and it’s not properly trapping interrupts during an rsync. Here’s an example:

#!/bin/bash
logfile=/path/to/file;
directory1=/path/to/dir
directory2=/path/to/dir

cleanup () {
     echo "Cleaning up!"
     #do stuff
     trap - EXIT 
}

trap '{
    (cleanup;) | 2>&1 tee -a $logfile
}' EXIT

(
    #main script logic, including the following lines:
    (exec sleep 10;);        
    (exec rsync --progress -av --delete $directory1 /var/tmp/$directory2;);

)  | 2>&1 tee -a $logfile
trap - EXIT #just in case cleanup isn't called for some reason

The idea of the script is this: most of the important logic runs in a subshell which is piped through tee and to a logfile, so I don’t have to tee every single line of the main logic to get it all logged. Whenever the subshell ends, or the script is stopped for any reason (the EXIT pseudosignal should capture all of these cases), the trap will intercept it and run the cleanup() function, and then remove the trap. The rsync and sleep commands (the sleep is just an example) are run through exec to prevent the creation of zombie processes if I kill the parent script while they’re running, and each potentially-long-running command is wrapped in its own subshell so that when exec finishes, it won’t terminate the whole script.

The problem:

If I interrupt the script (via kill or CTRL+C) during the exec/subshell wrapped sleep command, the trap works properly, and I see “Cleaning up!” echoed and logged. If I interrupt the script during the rsync command, I see rsync end, and write rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at rsync.c(544) [sender=3.0.6] to the screen, and then the script just dies; no cleanup, no trapping. Why doesn’t an interrupting/killing of rsync trigger the trap?

I’ve tried using the --no-detach switch with rsync, but it didn’t change anything.
I have bash 4.1.2, rsync 3.0.6, centOS 6.2.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    How about just having all the output from point X be redirected to tee without having to repeat it everywhere and mess with all the sub-shells and execs … (hope I didn’t miss something)

    #!/bin/bash
logfile=/path/to/file;
directory1=/path/to/dir
directory2=/path/to/dir

exec > >(exec tee -a $logfile) 2>&1

cleanup () {
     echo "Cleaning up!"
     #do stuff
     trap - EXIT 
}
trap cleanup EXIT

sleep 10
rsync --progress -av --delete $directory1 /var/tmp/$directory2
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