Solaris™ 8 Advanced System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

Debugging Shell Scripts

The following sections provide some suggestions for debugging shell scripts.

Using Debugging Flags

A common problem when writing shell scripts is that the shell does not interpret the command in exactly the way that you expect. When the shell interprets a command line, it substitutes variables with values, replaces file-name wildcards with the appropriate file names, and performs command substitution. If the interpretation transforms a command line into something unexpected, the command most likely will not execute the way you intend it to.

All three shells provide -x (echo) and -v (verbose) options that you can use to help pinpoint where problems are occurring in a script. The -v option displays each line of the script ...