> The behavior of set -e is quite unpredictable. If you choose to use it, you will have to be hyper-aware of all the false positives that can cause it to trigger, and work around them by "marking" every line that's allowed to fail with something like ||true.
Start there, then go back to the beginning for the extensive exposition against using set -e.
FWIW, I (a random person on the internet) use set -e for most scripts I write, and despite the caveats, find set -e is generally more beneficial than troublesome. I don't think Mr. Wooledge is wrong, it's just the groove I've settled in. I do sometimes consciously avoid using set -e, when I explicitly handle errors for every single element of the script.
The link is interesting, but more a rant than convincing not to use set -e. What would be the alternative? Handling errors yourself in every single command will for sure introduce more surprises and bugs. Of course bash is not the language to control a nuclear power plant. Even C has tons of undefined behavior. But writing all the shell scripts we use in this company without major problems in Rust would be prohibitively expensive.
I do not doubt that may bash scripters shoot themselves in the foot. You need at least one reviewer that understands well how the language works.
That said I prefer dash for scripting except when I really need arrays, which is rare. I have no scientific evidence, but KISS is good and bash just seems to have too many bells and whistles. And as the article mentions, bash seems to change in surprising ways between versions. I have also been bitten by that. Unfortunately dash has no set -o pipefail.
> The behavior of set -e is quite unpredictable. If you choose to use it, you will have to be hyper-aware of all the false positives that can cause it to trigger, and work around them by "marking" every line that's allowed to fail with something like ||true.
Start there, then go back to the beginning for the extensive exposition against using set -e.
FWIW, I (a random person on the internet) use set -e for most scripts I write, and despite the caveats, find set -e is generally more beneficial than troublesome. I don't think Mr. Wooledge is wrong, it's just the groove I've settled in. I do sometimes consciously avoid using set -e, when I explicitly handle errors for every single element of the script.