Run commands when a shell script exits

Sometimes it’s useful to run commands when a shell script exits. For example, we might want to hide the cursor while playing a progress animation, and show it again when finished. But what if the user hits ctrl-c to exit the application? If we don’t explicitly re-enable the cursor, it’ll remain hidden even after the script has exited.

A bit of searching turned up the trap command, which runs another command when the program receives a signal from the operating system.

The syntax is trap [action condition...]. Here’s an example of running some cleanup code when the program receives SIGINT (which is triggered by ctrl-c) or SIGTERM:

cleanup () {
    # commands go here
    exit
}

trap cleanup INT TERM