this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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You know.... I was about to reply with "I use
set -eand 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 waslocal var=$(fail)andif 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 || diecombo 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 -eis 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.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.