4.3 Quitting the BASH debugger (‘quit’, ‘kill’)

quit [expression]

quit [expression [subshell-levels]]

q

To exit the BASH debugger, use the quit command (abbreviated q), or type an end-of-file character (usually C-d). If you do not supply expression, the BASH debugger will try to terminate normally or with exit code 0. Otherwise it will terminate using the result of expression as the exit code.

A simple quit tries to terminate all nested subshells that may be in effect. If you are nested a subshell, this is normally indicated in a debugger prompt by the number of parentheses that the history number is inside — no parenthesis means there is no subshell in effect. The dynamic variable BASH_SUBSHELL also contains the number of subshells in effect.

If you want only to terminate some number of subshells but not all of them, you can give a count of the number of subshells to leave after the return-code expression. To leave just one level of subshell return does almost the same thing. (See see Returning) There is a subtle difference between the two though: return will leave you at the beginning of the next statement while quit may leave you at the place the subshell was invoked which may be in the middle of another command such as an assignment statement or condition test.

If the environment variable _Dbg_QUIT_ON_QUIT is set, when the program terminates, the debugger will also terminate too. This may be useful if you are debugging a script which calls another script and you want this inner script just to return to the outer script.

kill

k

In situations where quit doesn’t work we provide an alternative and more forceful quit command: kill. This sends to the OS non-maskable KILL signal with the debugger process number. No cleanup of temporary files is done by the program.