Mastering Bash

Exiting a script

So far, we have seen how a script terminated with the exit status of the last command issued, and how a $? allows us to read the exit value. This is possible because every command returns an exit code, whether issued on the command line or from inside a script, and even functions that we can think of as a compound of commands return a value. Now we are going to see how a script can return an exit code on its own, despite of the result of the last command issued:

#!/bin/bash    counter=10    while [ $counter -gt 0 ]; doecho "Loop number: $((counter--))"doneexit 20  

We took one of our previous scripts and added this:

exit 20  

As you can see, we used the command exit followed by a positive number to give an exit code. Remember that ...