How to Ignore Failures in a Shell Step?

Issue

I don’t want a Shell script to abort on failure
I want to run a Shell script all the way and report failures

Environment

CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise
Jenkins

Resolution

When running bash, you can control the execution of your script on error (exit code different to 0) using the set built-in with the +e option. This will disable the "exit on non 0" behavior:

# Disable exit on non 0
set +e

#Do something. If something fails with exit!=0 the script continues anyway

# Enable exit on non 0
set -e

# Do something. If something fails with exit!=0 the script stops

However, with the previous script, Jenkins will not mark the build as FAILURE as it ignores any failure. Another way of not stopping on a failure is to add || true to your command or add || <doSomethingOnFailure> if you want to do something on failure:

#Do something that might fail but we don't care. Loop is completed.
while ...
do
    command || true
done

# Do something that might fail but we care. Loop is completed. If there was an error, the variable error is created and set to true
while ...
do
    command || error=true
done

#Fail the build if there was an error
if [ $error ]
then
    exit -1
fi

This article is part of our Knowledge Base and is provided for guidance-based purposes only. The solutions or workarounds described here are not officially supported by CloudBees and may not be applicable in all environments. Use at your own discretion, and test changes in a safe environment before applying them to production systems.