Note: This thread is entirely about bash. No other shells or "POSIX" are
relevant here. But comparisons between various versions of bash may be
relevant, since I think the behavior may have changed over the versions.

That said, suppose I have something like:

trap 'date > /tmp/somefile' EXIT

# Rest of script

Now, if during "Rest of script", say I hit ^C. Or ^\. Or, say I send a
signal via "kill" from another terminal. Does my exit trap get executed?

I've had varying results. I am pretty sure that at one point, the answer
was "no", but recently, I've noticed that when I exit via ^C, the EXIT trap
does execute. I'm curious what the "official" answer is.

--
The people who tell us to be proud of the white race are the ones who make
us the most embarrassed by it.

gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack):
> Note: This thread is entirely about bash. No other shells or "POSIX" are
> relevant here. But comparisons between various versions of bash may be
> relevant, since I think the behavior may have changed over the versions.
>
> That said, suppose I have something like:
>
> trap 'date > /tmp/somefile' EXIT
>
> # Rest of script
>
> Now, if during "Rest of script", say I hit ^C. Or ^\. Or, say I send a
> signal via "kill" from another terminal. Does my exit trap get executed?
>
> I've had varying results. I am pretty sure that at one point, the answer
> was "no", but recently, I've noticed that when I exit via ^C, the EXIT trap
> does execute. I'm curious what the "official" answer is.
>

The "official" answer should be in the "bash" documentation, but
anyone who would like to investigate it, might let "bash" run the
following script ("the_script")

#!/bin/sh
trap_command()
{
cat <<EOF
printf 'Executing %s trap at ' ${1:?} &&
date -- '+%F %T'
EOF
}

command="$( trap_command EXIT )" &&
trap "$command" EXIT &&

for signal
do
(
sleep -- 1 &&
printf 'Sending signal %s at ' "$signal" &&
date -- '+%F %T' &&
kill -s "$signal" -- "$$"
) &
sleep -- 3
done

providing signal names as parameters and observe what the shell
will do, for example

(
for signal in INT QUIT HUP TERM
do
bash ./the_script "$signal"
printf 'Script exited returning status %s\n' "$?"
done
)