Question

I am using a shell script in Jenkins that, at a certain point, uploads a file to a server using curl. I would like to see whatever output curl produces but also check whether it is the output I expect. If it isn’t, then I want to set the shell error code to > 0 so that Jenkins knows the script failed.

I first tried using curl -f, but this causes the pipe to be cut as soon as the upload fails and the error output never gets to the client. Then I tried something like this:

curl ...params... | tee /dev/tty | \
  xargs -I{} test "Expected output string" = '{}'

This works from a normal SSH shell but in the Jenkins console output I see:

tee: /dev/tty: No such device or address

I’m not sure why this is since I thought Jenkins was communicating with the slave using a normal SSH shell. In any case, the whole xargs + test thing strikes me as a bit of a hack.

Is there a way to accomplish this in Jenkins so that I can see the output and also test whether it matches a specific string?

Answer 1

When Jenkins communicates with slave via SSH, there is no terminal allocated, and so there is no /dev/tty device for that process.

Maybe you can send it to /dev/stderr instead? It will be a terminal in an interactive session and some log file in non-interactive session.