Close all file descriptors in bash

Question

Is there a way to close all the open file descriptors, without having an explicit list of them beforehand?

Answer 1

To answer literally, to close all open file descriptors for bash:

for fd in $(ls /proc/$$/fd); do
  eval "exec $fd>&-"
done

However this really isn't a good idea since it will close the basic file descriptors the shell needs for input and output. If you do this, none of the programs you run will have their output displayed on the terminal (unless they write to the tty device directly). If fact in my tests closing stdin (exec 0>&-) just causes an interactive shell to exit.

What you may actually be looking to do is rather to close all file descriptors that are not part of the shell's basic operation. These are 0 for stdin, 1 for stdout and 2 for stderr. On top of this some shells also seem to have other file descriptors open by default. In bash, for example, you have 255 (also for terminal I/O) and in dash I have 10, which points to /dev/tty rather than the specific tty/pts device the terminal is using. To close everything apart from 0, 1, 2 and 255 in bash:

for fd in $(ls /proc/$$/fd); do
  case "$fd" in
    0|1|2|255)
      ;;
    *)
      eval "exec $fd>&-"
      ;;
  esac
done

Note also that eval is required when redirecting the file descriptor contained in a variable, if not bash will expand the variable but consider it part of the command (in this case it would try to exec the command 0 or 1 or whichever file descriptor you are trying to close).

NOTE: Also using a glob instead of ls (eg /proc/$$/fd/*) seems to open an extra file descriptor for the glob, so ls seems the best solution here.

Update

For further information on the portability of /proc/$$/fd, please see Portability of file descriptor links. If /proc/$$/fd is unavailable, then a drop in replacement for the $(ls /proc/$$/fd), using lsof (if that is available) would be $(lsof -p $$ -Ff | grep f[0-9] | cut -c 2-).

Answer 2

In recent versions of Bash (4.1 and onward, year 2009 and later) you can specify the file descriptor to close using a shell variable:

for fd in $(ls /proc/$$/fd/); do
    [ $fd -gt 2 ] && exec {fd}<&-
done

The feature had been in Korn shell already (since 1993?) but apparently took some time to make its way into Bash.

Answer 3

Simple way

eval exec {0..255}">&-"

exec {0..255}">&-" expands to the exec 0>&- 1>&- ... 255>&- literal string, according to Brace Expansion (see Brace Expansion chapter in man bash for more info), then eval actually evaluates the command

Answer 4

Clear all file descriptors except i/o/e of the current shell, but also excludes the ones provided as arguments

clear_fds() {
for fd in $(compgen -G "/proc/$BASHPID/fd/*"); do
    fd=${fd/*\/}
        if [[ ! " $* " =~ " ${fd} " ]]; then
            case "$fd" in
                0|1|2|255)
                ;;
                *)
                    eval "exec $fd>&-"
                    ;;
            esac
        fi
done
}

Answer 5

No. The kernel can close only one FD at a time, and bash does not have "group commands" for FDs.

for fd in $(ls -1 /proc/27343/fd); do echo exec $fd">&"-; done

Remove the echo and the " after testing.

If this is not for the shell itself but for a command to be run then you can use nohup.

Answer 6

You can do it without subshell $(....) and without referring parent process, furthermore, if you are using Bash 4.1+, you can do it without eval.

for path in /proc/self/fd/*; do
  fd=${path##*/} # get name part
  exec {fd}>&-
done

More resonable implementation should exclude the stdin,stdout,stderr, left them to the caller side.

for path in /proc/self/fd/*; do
  fd=${path##*/} # get name part
  ((fd < 3)) || exec {fd}>&-
done

Answer 7

Another way without "eval" at all, is to use the form:

$ exec {var_a}>> file.txt
$ echo $var_a
10
$ ls -l /proc/self/fd/10
l-wx------ 1 0 0 64 Dec 11 18:32 /proc/self/fd/10 -> /run/user/0/tmp/file.txt
$ echo "aaaaa" >&$var_a
$ cat file.txt
aaaaa
$ exec {var_a}>&-
$ ls /proc/self/fd/10
ls: cannot access '/proc/self/fd/10': No such file or directory