Return value after command-line script crashes is EXIT_SUCCESS rather than EXIT_FAILURE

[juliangilbey]

With QuPath-0.2.3, I ran a broken script like this:

QuPath-0.2.3 script -i /path/to/image.tif brokenscript

where brokenscript gave a Java exception. Unfortunately, QuPath then exited with status 0 (EXIT_SUCCESS), meaning that my calling script cannot easily test whether the script worked or not.

It would be great if QuPath exited with an error status if the script exits with an error.

Best wishes, Julian

[juliangilbey]

A little more on this: it is partly a Java issue - see this StackExchange post: Java exits with EXIT_SUCCESS on an uncaught exception. I have found the source of this uncaught exception: in src/main/java/qupath/QuPath.java, there are three different places where runScript is called, only one of which is protected by a try/catch construct, so if an exception is thrown in one of the other two cases (as happened to me), the exception is not caught but instead causes Java to crash. In particular, I can't then check for the logger message which is produced by this code in the first case:

logger.error("Error running script for image: " + entry.getImageName(), e);

So the solution would simply be to try/catch the other two cases as well.

Best wishes, Julian

[juliangilbey]

Ah, the whole thing is in a try/catch block, so that's not the problem. My script threw an unhandled exception: NumberFormatException at line 167: empty String, and QuPath doesn't know what to do with that. I can fix the bug in my script, but I can't see how to make QuPath fail more gracefully.

Best wishes, Julian

[petebankhead]

Hi @juliangilbey, I've tried to tackle this in #676

I'm not sure if I've taken the cleanest approach - if you've time to have a look I'd be very interested in your feedback.

[juliangilbey]

Thanks @petebankhead!
My Java's not quite good enough to comment on all of it in detail, but it looks great, thank you! I like the interesting solution to parsing arguments; it's definitely simpler to implement than the space-delimited alternative proposed, and I like the idea of having two ways to invoke it.
I've left one comment and was going to ask if you've seen it, but as you've already replied to it, I guess you have!
Best wishes, Julian