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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I wrote the following atexit implementation for Bash

#! /bin/bash

set -e

ATEXIT=()

function atexit_handler
{
  local EXPR
  for EXPR in "${ATEXIT[@]}"; do
    echo "evaluating $EXPR"
    eval "$EXPR" || true
  done
}

trap atexit_handler EXIT

function atexit ()
{
  local EXPR
  for EXPR in "$@"; do
    ATEXIT+=("$EXPR")
  done
}

atexit true
atexit false
atexit "echo bye"

false

I am wondering, if this is possible without the use of eval.

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1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote

I don't think it's possible without the eval. A close candidate might be:

atexit_handler() {
  local EXPR
  for EXPR in "${ATEXIT[@]}"; do
    echo "evaluating $EXPR"
    $EXPR || true
  done
}

But this won't work with non-trivial expressions like this:

atexit 'for i in "a b" c; do echo $i; done'

Using the function keyword in function declaration like this is an outdated practice:

function atexit_handler
{
  local EXPR
  for EXPR in "${ATEXIT[@]}"; do
    echo "evaluating $EXPR"
    eval "$EXPR" || true
  done
}

Use the more modern style I wrote in the previous example above.

Have you considered trapping other signals too than EXIT?

trap atexit_handler EXIT

A common practice in clean-up scripts is to handle 1 2 3 15, but it's up to you how you want to use this.

Instead of this:

  for EXPR in "$@"; do
    ATEXIT+=("$EXPR")
  done

A simpler way to iterate over $@:

  for EXPR; do
    ATEXIT+=("$EXPR")
  done

But actually, as @etan-reisner pointed out in a comment, it's silly to loop here when you can add the entire arg list in one swift move:

ATEXIT+=("$@")
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1  
Why bother iterating over "$@" at all? Why not just splat it into the () directly? ATEXIT+=("$@") –  Etan Reisner Oct 23 '14 at 18:45
1  
Using set -e means it works even when the script is run "manually" (i.e. bash myscript.sh) which the shebang does not. –  Etan Reisner Oct 23 '14 at 18:46
    
@EtanReisner spot on! Thanks for that. I added the first point to my answer and removed the second. –  janos♦ Oct 23 '14 at 20:34
    
Emacs does not color the function names in sh-mode. Using the function keyword adds some syntax highlighting to functions. –  ceving Oct 27 '14 at 9:51

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