👀 Views: 23 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14

bash trap signal-handling

I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me... Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm working with unexpected behavior in my bash script when using `trap` to handle `SIGINT`. My script is designed to perform a series of operations, and I want to ensure that when the user sends an interrupt signal (like Ctrl+C), it cleans up temporary files and exits gracefully. However, it appears that the trap is not being executed as expected. Here's the relevant portion of my script: ```bash #!/bin/bash trap 'cleanup; exit' SIGINT cleanup() { echo "Cleaning up..." rm -f /tmp/mytempfile } for i in {1..5}; do echo "Processing item $i..." sleep 2 done ``` When I run this script, it correctly prints "Processing item 1..." and waits for 2 seconds. However, if I hit Ctrl+C during the sleep, it does not invoke the `cleanup` function as expected. Instead, the script terminates abruptly without any cleanup, and I see no output from the `cleanup` function. I've tried adding `set -x` at the top of my script to debug, and the output shows that the `trap` is being set, but it seems to be ignored once the `sleep` command is running. I'm running this on Ubuntu 20.04 with Bash version 5.0.17. Is there a specific reason why the `trap` is not working in this case? What can I do to ensure that my cleanup function is executed when a `SIGINT` is received? This is part of a larger service I'm building. Thanks in advance! Could this be a known issue? For reference, this is a production CLI tool. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.