Question

I’ve written a script for me to start and stop my Perforce server. To shutdown the server I use the kill -SIGTERM command with the PID of the server daemon. It works as it should but there are some discrepancies in my script concerning the output behavior.

The script looks as follows:

#!/bin/sh -e

  export P4JOURNAL=/var/log/perforce/journal
  export P4LOG=/var/log/perforce/p4err
  export P4ROOT=/var/local/perforce_depot
  export P4PORT=1666

  PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"

  . /lib/lsb/init-functions

  p4start="p4d -d"
  p4stop="p4 admin stop"
  p4user=perforce

  case "$1" in
  start)
    log_action_begin_msg "Starting Perforce Server"
    daemon -u $p4user -- $p4start;
    echo "\n"
    ;;

  stop)
    echo "BLABLA"
    echo "$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)"
    #daemon -u $p4user -- $p4stop;
    p4dPid="$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)"
    echo $p4dPid
    if [ -z "$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)" ]; then
      echo "ERROR: No Perforce Server running!"
    else
      echo "SUCCESS: Found Perforce Server running!\n\t"
      echo "Shutting down Perforce Server..."
      kill -15 $p4dPid;
    fi
    echo "\n"
    ;;

  restart)
    stop
    start
    ;;

  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/perforce (start|stop|restart)"
    exit 1
    ;;

esac

exit 0

When p4d is running the stop block works as intended, but when there is no p4d running the script with stop only outputs BLABLA and an empty new line because of the echo "$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)". The error message stating that no server is running is never printed. What am I doing wrong here?

PS: The part if [ -z "$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)" ]; then has been changed from if [ -z "$p4dPid" ]; then for debug reasons.

EDIT: I narrowed down the problem. If I don’t use the p4dPid variable and comment out the lines p4dPid="$(pidof /usr/local/bin/p4d)" and echo $p4dPid the if block is processed and the error messages is printed. Still I don’t unterstand what is causing this behavior.

EDIT 2: Problem solved!

The -e in #!/bin/sh -e was causing the shell to exit the script after any statement returning a non-zero return value.

Answer 1

Problem solved!

The -e in #!/bin/sh -e was causing the shell to exit after any statement returning a non-zero return value.