are there any benefits of ending a bash script with exit

Question

I encountered a bash script ending with the exit line. Does it changes behavior (save scaring users who 'source' rather than calling straight with closing the terminal )?

Note that I am not particularly interested in difference between exit and return. Here I am only interested in differences between having exit without parameters in the end of a bash script (one being closing console or process which sources the script rather than calling).

Could it be to address some less known shell dialects?

Answer 1

The one significant advantage is that it gives you explicit control over the return code.

Otherwise the return code of the script is going to be the return code of whatever the last command it executed happened to be. Which may or may not be indicative of the actual success or failure of the script as a whole.

A slightly less significant advantage is that if the last command's exit code is significant, and you follow it up with "exit $?" that tells the maintenance programmer coming along later that yes, you did consider what the exit code of the program should be and he shouldn't monkey with it without understanding why.

Conversely, of course, I wouldn't recommend ending a bash script with an explicit call to exit unless you really mean "ignore all previous exit codes and use this one". Because that's what anyone else looking at your code is going to assume you wanted and they're going to be annoyed that you wasted their time trying to figure out why if you did it just by rote and not for a reason.

Answer 2

There are generally no benefits to doing this. There are only downsides, specifically the inability to source scripts like you say.

You can construct scenarios where it matters, such as having a sourceing script rely on it for termination on errors, or having a self-extracting archive header avoid executing its payload, but these unusual cases should not be the basis for a general guideline.