Gfilui

I am testing out debootstrap in a chroot via a bash script.

The snippet that runs it is:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
...
...
sudo debootstrap --verbose --arch=$ARCH $RELEASE $chroot_dir
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
 echo "debootstrap failed."
 echo "See $chroot_dir/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for more information."
 exit 1
fi

echo "debootstrap succeeded"

However, after running the script the last lines printed to the terminal are:

I: Chosen extractor for .deb packages: dpkg-deb
I: Extracting adduser...

I don't see the failed or the succeeded message.

The debootstrap log in the chroot says:

tar: ./usr/sbin/addgroup: Cannot create symlink to 'adduser': File exists
tar: ./usr/sbin/delgroup: Cannot create symlink to 'deluser': File exists
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

So clearly something has failed.

Why am I not able to catch this in my error check block?

If you just want to test for an exit code, bash has the following simple syntax:

if debootstrap --verbose --arch=$ARCH $RELEASE $chroot_dir
then
 echo Success
else
 echo Failure
fi

The reason why the other way doesn't work is because set -e causes the script to exit before the exit code is tested.

For further reading about exit values and error trapping see the following links:

• http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105


• https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/testing-exit-values-bash/