Raise error in a Bash script

I want to raise an error in a Bash script with message "Test cases Failed !!!". How to do this in Bash?

For example:

if [ condition ]; then
    raise error "Test cases failed !!!"
fi

This depends on where you want the error message be stored.

You can do the following:

echo "Error!" > logfile.log
exit 125

Or the following:

echo "Error!" 1>&2
exit 64

When you raise an exception you stop the program's execution.

You can also use something like exit xxx where xxx is the error code you may want to return to the operating system (from 0 to 255). Here 125 and 64 are just random codes you can exit with. When you need to indicate to the OS that the program stopped abnormally (eg. an error occurred), you need to pass a non-zero exit code to exit.

As @chepner pointed out, you can do exit 1, which will mean an unspecified error.

Basic error handling

If your test case runner returns a non-zero code for failed tests, you can simply write:

test_handler test_case_x; test_result=$?
if ((test_result != 0)); then
  printf '%s\n' "Test case x failed" >&2  # write error message to stderr
  exit 1                                  # or exit $test_result
fi

Or even shorter:

if ! test_handler test_case_x; then
  printf '%s\n' "Test case x failed" >&2
  exit 1
fi

Or the shortest:

test_handler test_case_x || { printf '%s\n' "Test case x failed" >&2; exit 1; }

To exit with test_handler's exit code:

test_handler test_case_x || { ec=$?; printf '%s\n' "Test case x failed" >&2; exit $ec; }

Advanced error handling

If you want to take a more comprehensive approach, you can have an error handler:

exit_if_error() {
  local exit_code=$1
  shift
  [[ $exit_code ]] &&               # do nothing if no error code passed
    ((exit_code != 0)) && {         # do nothing if error code is 0
      printf 'ERROR: %s\n' "$@" >&2 # we can use better logging here
      exit "$exit_code"             # we could also check to make sure
                                    # error code is numeric when passed
    }
}

then invoke it after running your test case:

run_test_case test_case_x
exit_if_error $? "Test case x failed"

or

run_test_case test_case_x || exit_if_error $? "Test case x failed"

The advantages of having an error handler like exit_if_error are:

• we can standardize all the error handling logic such as logging, printing a stack trace, notification, doing cleanup etc., in one place
• by making the error handler get the error code as an argument, we can spare the caller from the clutter of if blocks that test exit codes for errors
• if we have a signal handler (using trap), we can invoke the error handler from there

Error handling and logging library

Here is a complete implementation of error handling and logging:

https://github.com/codeforester/base/blob/master/lib/stdlib.sh

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