this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
248 points (98.8% liked)

Technology

83789 readers
4347 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] coriza@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

You know.... I was about to reply with "I use set -e and I love it, but them I read the link and it gave me flashbacks. In a previous work at some points I programmed way more in bash than the languages I was officially hired to program into, and I run in some many of this edge cases, I think almost all of the ones mentioned in the link, including doing the workarounds mentioned. two that standed out to me was local var=$(fail) and if f(). Side note, I remember finding a bug in declare (I don't remember exactly, but one of the flags, maybe -l to make a local variable was not working) and was só excited to fill a bug report but then I saw that it had already fixed in a newer bash release.

Anyway, In the end if I recall correctly I never settled in a one fixed approach, I distinctly remember adding set -eu to a bunch of scripts but also remember having to set +e in some cases like when sourcing other scripts and also adding the suggested foo || die combo a bunch"

I think in the end my approach was the same as rking's at the end of the linked text, I used it but not relied on it. And I guess using too much bash made me paranoid and I heavily tested every line for all sorts of error cases. I think set -e is good when debugging when the thing is not working, especially because bash also suffers to lack a good debug and tracing environment, leaving you to set a bunch of stuff just to have a trace of your script and see what it is doing.

[–] toynbee@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

I remember a while ago - when, like in your anecdote, I mostly coded in bash - I had a dream that I found out people were invoking my scripts in a manner that essentially overrode settings that might (or, in my case, might not) have been set at the beginning of the script.

This never (AFAIK) happened in waking hours, but I was very offended in the dream.