Refactoring legacy shell scripts to better handle file permissions during migration
I'm upgrading from an older version and Can someone help me understand I just started working with I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me... Working on a project where we are migrating an old codebase, I've stumbled upon several shell scripts that handle file manipulation. These scripts often assume that they run with sufficient permissions, which isn't always the case in our new environment. My goal is to refactor these scripts to ensure they check for permissions before attempting to create or modify files. Here’s an example of a current script that creates a temporary file: ```shell #!/bin/bash temp_file='/tmp/my_temp_file.txt' echo 'Creating temp file...' cat /dev/null > $temp_file ``` This works fine, but I'd like to add checks to ensure that the script has the necessary permissions to write to `/tmp`. I've tried using `[[ -w /tmp ]]` before the file creation, but I’m unsure of the best approach to handle the errors if permissions are lacking. Would it be better to redirect stderr to a log file, or should I exit the script gracefully with a message to the user? Here’s a more detailed version I’ve been tinkering with: ```shell if [[ -w /tmp ]]; then cat /dev/null > $temp_file else echo "Error: No write permissions to /tmp" >&2 exit 1 fi ``` The above tweaks help address the permissions issue, yet I wonder if there are other best practices I should consider when refactoring. Additionally, as we're looking at a batch of these scripts, it would be great to maintain consistency across them. Do you have any suggestions on robust error handling or ways to log issues effectively throughout the script’s execution? Any tips for structuring the code to maintain readability while ensuring it adheres to our new permission policies would also be appreciated. My development environment is macOS. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The stack includes Shell and several other technologies. The project is a application built with Shell. What's the best practice here? For reference, this is a production desktop app. Thanks, I really appreciate it!