Interview › Scripting (Bash, Groovy)
How would you run cleanup code whether a script succeeds or fails? [Intermediate]
Answer
I run cleanup on both success and failure by registering a cleanup function with trap ... EXIT. The EXIT trap runs whenever the script exits, regardless of whether the exit was caused by success, an error, or an explicit exit.
Technical explanation
Capture the original exit code inside cleanup if the handler needs to log status and preserve the same result.
Use cleanup for temp directories, lock files, background child processes, and partial artifacts.
Avoid masking the original failure by accidentally returning success from cleanup after an error.
Hands-on example
tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
cleanup() {
rc=$?
rm -rf "$tmpdir"
echo "cleanup complete, rc=$rc" >&2
exit "$rc"
}
trap cleanup EXIT
cp input.txt "$tmpdir/input.txt"
process "$tmpdir/input.txt
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