Question

I’have a bash script calling a jar file like this:

awk -f fileformat.awk list.txt | while read arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 arg5; do    
    java -jar /bin/2dbf.jar arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 arg5

    if [[ ${?} -eq 0 ]]; then
        echo "2dbf.jar finished at: `date "+%F %T"`"
        echo "---------------------------------------------"
    else
        echo "exiting..."
        exit 10
    fi
done

the fileformat.awk look like this: if the line starts with # or it does not have 5 fields exit the program.

{ 
    if (NF == 5 && $1 !~ /#.*/) {
        print $0 
    } else { 
        print "incorrect file format"
        "exit 1"
    }
}

What I want is that exit 1 in the awk script terminates the whole shell script. but actually it doesn’t and the jar file throws exception because of wrong options.

Answer 1

Because your exit is in quotes in the AWK program, it is spawning an subshell and exiting from that. And because you’re printing the error message to stdout, that feeds the while loop. Change your AWK script to this and it should work:

{ 
    if (NF == 5 && $1 !~ /#.*/) {
        print $0 
    } else { 
        print "incorrect file format" > "/dev/stderr"
        exit 1
    }
}