Temporarily unset bash option -x

Question

I like to use set -x in scripts to show what's going on, especially if the script is going to run in a CI/CD pipeline and I might need to debug some failure post-hoc.

One annoyance with doing this is that if I want to echo some text to the user (e.g., a status message or "I'm starting to do $X") then that message gets output twice - once for the echo command itself being echoed, and then once as the output of that echo command.

What's a good way to make this nicer? One solution is this:

set -x

... bunch of normal commands that get echoed

(
  # Temporarily don't echo, so we don't double-echo
  set +x
  echo "Here is my status message"
)

... rest of commands get echoed again

But the two problems with that are

1. That's a lot of machinery to write every time I want to tell the user something, and it's "non-obvious" enough that it probably requires the comment every time
2. It echoes the set +x too, which is undesirable.

Is there another option that works well?

Something like Make's feature of prepending an @ to suppress echoing would be great, but I've not been able to find such a feature in Bash.

Answer 1

You can achieve this in Bash by not using set -x and instead trapping DEBUG and doing your own tracing:

#!/bin/bash

set -T

trap '! [[ "$BASH_COMMAND" =~ ^(echo|printf) ]] &&
      printf "+ %s\n" "$BASH_COMMAND"' DEBUG

foo=bar
echo This is a test
echo $foo
[[ $foo = bar ]] && /usr/bin/printf 'Matched\n'

The idea is to add commands you want to ignore to the regex in the trap line. Running the above produces

+ foo=bar
This is a test
bar
+ [[ $foo = bar ]]
+ /usr/bin/printf 'Matched\n'
Matched

set -T ensures that the trap is inherited by shell functions.

You can add a separate mechanism to enable and disable the trap, e.g. with a shell variable:

#!/bin/bash

set -T

status() {
        NOTRACE=1 echo "$@"
}

trap '! [[ "$BASH_COMMAND" =~ ^(status|NOTRACE=) ]] &&
      printf "+ %s\n" "$BASH_COMMAND"' DEBUG

foo=bar
test=$(echo baz)
echo This is a test
status This is a status report
echo $foo
[[ $foo = bar ]] && /usr/bin/printf 'Matched\n'

This produces

+ foo=bar
+ test=$(echo baz)
+ echo This is a test
This is a test
This is a status report
+ echo $foo
bar
+ [[ $foo = bar ]]
+ /usr/bin/printf 'Matched\n'
Matched

Answer 2

This is a horrible kluge, and I feel dirty for suggesting it, but... you could do this with a magic alias. The key to this trick is that aliases are expanded as part of the parsing phase of command execution, so set -x won't make anything print as they expand (unlike a function). So you can make an alias that prepends the "turn off -x" boilerplate before the echo command, and then it turns out you also need a function to run the "turn -x back on" boilerplate at the end.

You also need to turn on alias expansion in your script. It's normally disabled, so that e.g. if you have something like grep aliased to grep --color, that won't make color codes get randomly injected up whenever the script uses grep. So it's safest to run unalias -a first, to remove any potentially troublesome aliases.

Anyway, here's the code:

unalias -a
shopt -s expand_aliases
alias cleanecho='{ set +x; } 2>/dev/null; resetx_after echo'
resetx_after() { "$@"; set -x; }

set -x
cleanecho "Ha, ha, you can't see the command that printed this!"

How it works: a command like cleanecho "something" expands to:

{ set +x; } 2>/dev/null; resetx_after echo "something"

{ set +x; } 2>/dev/null turns off -x mode (with its own trace redirected to /dev/null). Then resetx_after echo "something" runs, executing:

{ echo "something"; set -x; }

...which prints the string and then turns -x tracing back on.

BTW, if you want to be able to use other commands like printf similarly, you could add similar aliases for them:

alias cleanprintf='{ set +x; } 2>/dev/null; resetx_after printf'

...or just make a generic don't-trace-this alias to use as a prefix:

alias notrace='{ set +x; } 2>/dev/null; resetx_after'
notrace printf 'set -x disabled for this command\n'

Answer 3

Easy. And you already half way solved it: just move set -x into the block

#!/bin/sh
echo a
(
    set -x
    echo b
)
echo c

$ a.sh
a
+ echo b
b
c

If you want to not trace a part of the script - do the tracing in two parts

#!/bin/sh
echo a
(
    set -x
    echo b
)
echo c
(
    set -x
    echo d
)
echo e

Just trace the suspicious pieces instead of whole script.