Re: [Help-bash] Option execfail does not work in subshells

[R. Diez]

> I had to look at the source. Subshells are specifically exempted from the
> execfail settings. It's been this way for at least 24 years, so the exact
> reason is lost to time.

Thanks for looking. I could almost forgive your wrong answer yesterday. }8-)

I am writing a shell script which needs execfail to work in a subshell, 
specifically when starting a background process with & . The reason is, 
I want to print a proper error message when the user passes the wrong 
command (for example), but I could think of other actions, like logging 
the failure somewhere.

There does not seem to be a valid reason for execfail to not work in a 
subshell. Should I create a bug for this? (I am assuming that there is a 
public bug tracker for Bash).

There is one other thing that I noticed. When the 'exec' calls redirects 
stdout and stderr, they remain redirected after 'exec' fails. I resorted 
to saving and restoring their file descriptors in this scenario. 
However, I think that this fact should be clearly documented, because, 
at the moment, after reading the docs you tend to believe that such a 
permanent redirection should only be the case if you specify no command 
to run in the 'exec' calls.

In any case, I wonder what other things do not get restored properly 
after 'exec' fails.

Regards,
  rdiez