Ignoring errors in a section of a Bash script#

For simonw/museums#32 I wanted to have certain lines in my Bash script ignore any errors: lines that used sqlite-utils to add columns and configure FTS, but that might fail with an error if the column already existed or FTS had already been configured.

This tip on StackOverflow lead me to the following recipe:

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#!/bin/bash
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set -euo pipefail
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yaml-to-sqlite browse.db museums museums.yaml --pk=id
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python annotate_nominatum.py browse.db
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python annotate_timestamps.py
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# Ignore errors in following block until set -e:
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set +e
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sqlite-utils add-column browse.db museums country 2>/dev/null
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sqlite3 browse.db < set-country.sql
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sqlite-utils disable-fts browse.db museums 2>/dev/null
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sqlite-utils enable-fts browse.db museums \
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  name description country osm_city \
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  --tokenize porter --create-triggers 2>/dev/null
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set -e

Everything between the set +e and the set -e lines can now error without the Bash script itself failing.

The failing lines were still showing a bunch of Python tracebacks. I fixed that by redirecting their standard error output to /dev/null like this:

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sqlite-utils disable-fts browse.db museums 2>/dev/null