How do I chain commands on the console?

Question

In bash, I sometimes want to run several commands in serial and don't want to wait for them to finish before I type the new ones. So I do something like this:

cmd1; cmd2; cmd3

Unfortunately, one of the commands might fail. In that case, I'd like to stop. Is there an easy way to do this, but make it so that I only keep running the commands if the previous command had a 0 exit code?

Answer 1

Use && operator,

cmd1 && cmd2 && cmd3

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In shellscripting, && and || operators are modelled after optimized implementation of logical operators in C. && means AND operator, and || means OR. The key point is that in C, the second operand of these operators isn't evaluated if the result is already known from the first operand. E.g. "false && x" is false for any x, so there is no need to evaluate x; similarly for "true || x".

And in Unix, it is traditional to interpret commands' return values as "successful completion" truth values: 0 means true (success), nonzero means false (failure). So, when the first command in cmd1 && cmd2 returns "false" (nonzero exit status, which indicates failure), the whole command's status is known: failure. So overall interpretation of cmd1 && cmd2 shell command may be: "execute cmd1, AND THEN, if it didn't fail, cmd2". Which is what you basically want in your question.

Similarly with OR: cmd1 || cmd2 can be interpreted as "execute cmd1, OR IF it fails, cmd2".

Answer 2

Simply with the && operator. For instance:

cmd1 && cmd2 && cmd3

If one of the commands fails (returns an exit value other than 0), the other commands won't run.

Answer 3

"Chaining Commands an grouping them"

ping 192.168.0.1 || { echo "ping not successful"; exit 1; }

pings, only if not successful, executes the chained group of commands in brackets.

Attention:

The list has to be terminated with a ";".

There must be blank spaces between brackets and the grouped commands!