Question

I’m looking for exception handling mechanism in shell script. Is there any try,catch equivalent mechanism in shell script ?

Answer 1

There is not really a try/catch in bash (i assume you’re using bash), but you can achieve a quite similar behaviour using && or ||.

In this example, you want to run fallback_command if a_command fails (returns a non-zero value):

a_command || fallback_command

And in this example, you want to execute second_command if a_command is successful (returns 0):

a_command && second_command

They can easily be mixed together by using a subshell, for example, the following command will execute a_command, if it succeeds it will then run other_command, but if a_command or other_command fails, fallback_command will be executed:

(a_command && other_command) || fallback_command