exit code is always 0

[John M]

It appears that backintime always returns an exit code of 0. This makes proper scripting difficult. I run backintime from a cron job and there's no way to check if it failed. Which means I have to manually check everyday if the backup ran.

It should return a non-zero exit code in case of some failure, as is standard for any console program. I understand that there is some kind of of callback mechanism that one can use, but simply fixing the application return code to work properly would be nicer.

[Rafael (rafaelliu)]

+1

Really make scripting impossible. Should comply to Linux standard exit codes.

Looks like a quick fix

[Rafael (rafaelliu)]

Looks like there's a plugin functionality built in BiT. Looking at the sources, appears to me that it already does a look of error handling through PluginManager.on_error().

A simple hack would be to edit pluginmanager.py and add a sys.exit() call:

        def on_error( self, code, message = '' ):
                for plugin in self.plugins:
                        plugin.on_error( code, message )

                # exit code
                sys.exit( code )

Of course, you will have to import sys..

[Julian Gilbey (jdg)]

Better than Rafael's hack is the following: in common/snapshots.py, take_snapshot returns a success status. This function is called by the take_snapshot function in common/backintime.py, but the return value is ignored. So instead, take_snapshot in common/backintime.py should read:

def take_snapshot( cfg, force = True ):
    logger.openlog()
    tools.load_env(cfg)
    ret = snapshots.Snapshots( cfg ).take_snapshot( force )
    logger.closelog()
    return ret

and then in the start_app loop in common/backintime.py do something like the following:

        if arg == '--backup' or arg == '-b':
            ret = take_snapshot( cfg, True )
            if ret:
                sys.exit(0)
            else:
                sys.exit(1)

        if arg == '--backup-job':
            ret = take_snapshot( cfg, False )
            if ret:
                sys.exit(0)
            else:
                sys.exit(1)

[Germar (germar)]

Thanks Julian, I'll have a look soon. BTW attached diffs are easier to read than inline code