bash ‘local’ directive eats status codes

Jonathon Anderson

2011-08-02 08:42

Did you know that the local directive in bash returns a status code? I didn’t.

#!/bin/bash

function return_nonzero
{
    return 1
}

function main
{
    v=$(return_nonzero)
    echo $?

    local v=$(return_nonzero)
    echo $?

    local v
    v=$(return_nonzero)
    echo $?
}

main

At runtime:

$ bash local-return-code.sh
1
0
1

At least some bugs teach you something new.