[SOLVED] fish shell evaluate make return code

Issue

I'm trying to write a script in Fish that runs a Make recipe and then executes all of the resultant binaries. The problem I'm having is that I would like to have the script exit with an error code if the make command encounters an error. Whenever I try to capture Make's return value, I end up with its output log instead.

For example:

if test (make allUnitTests) -eq 0
    echo "success"
else
    echo "fail"
end

returns an error because "test" is seeing the build process, not the terminating condition.

I wrote the script so that I could easily make Jenkins run all my unit tests whenever I trigger a build. Since I haven't been able to get the above section of the script working correctly, I've instead instructed Jenkins to run the make command as a separate command, which does exactly what I want: halting the entire build process without executing any binaries if anything fails to compile. Thus, at this point my question is more of an academic exercise, but I would like to add building the unit test binaries into the script (and have it cleanly terminate on a build error) for the benefit of any humans who might check out the code and would like to run the unit tests.

I played a little with something like:

if test (count (make allUnitTests | grep "Stop")) -eq 0

but this has two problems:

1. I'm apparently piping stdout when I need to pipe stderr. (Come to think of it, if I could just check to see if anything was written to stderr, then I wouldn't need grep at all.)
2. Grep is swallowing all the log data piped to it, which I really want to be visible on the console.

Solution

You are misunderstanding the parentheses - these run a command substitution. What this does is capture the output of the process running in the substitution, which it will then use as arguments (separated by newlines by default) to the process outside.

This means your test will receive the full output of make.

What you instead want to do is just run if make allUnitTests without any parens, since you are just interested in the return value.

If you would like to do something between running make and checking its return value, the "$status" variable always contains the return value of the last command, so you can save that:

make allUnitTests
set -l makestatus $status
# Do something else
if test $makestatus -eq 0
   # Do the if-thing
else
   # Do the else-thing
end

Answered By - faho

Answer Checked By - Senaida (WPSolving Volunteer)