Question

I’m writing a shell script with #!/bin/sh as the first line so that the script exits on the first error. There are a few lines in the file that are in the form of command || true so that the script doesn’t exit right there if the command fails. However, I still want to know know the exit code of the command. How would I get the exit code without having to use set +e to temporarily disable that behavior?

Answer 1

Your question appears to imply set -e.

Assuming set -e:

Instead of command || true you can use command || exitCode=$?. The script will continue and the exit status of command is captured in exitCode.

$? is an internal variable that keeps the exit code of the last command.

Since || short-circuits if command succeeds, set exitCode=0 between tests or instead use: command && exitCode=0 || exitCode=$?.

But prefer to avoid set -e style scripting altogether, and instead add explicit error handling to each command in your script.