I have never liked this statement of the problem.

It is not that `set -e` is bad, it is that bash is a bit weird in this area and you have to know when things eat errors and when they don't. This is not really changed by `set -e`: you already had to know them to make safe code. `set -e` does not wave a magic wand saying you don't have to understand bash error control.

But having `set -e` is almost universally better for people who do not understand it (and I would argue also for people who do). Without it you are responsible for implementing error handling on almost every line.

As other have already said: this is one of those things that generally pushes me to other languages (in my case often Python), as the error handling is much more intuitive, and much less tricky to get right.

▲

fireflash38 3 days ago | parent [-]

One of my major nitpicks with set -e isn't from bash... It's from poorly behaved programs you might run. Ones that don't exit with defined exit codes (non-zero on error!).

	▲	inetknght 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Ones that don't exit with defined exit codes (non-zero on error!). My favorite is `docker images`. It outputs... not-empty when the output is empty. It returns zero (success) when output is not-empty and empty. So you have to both do error checking and parse its output before you know whether there are any matching images in the cache. Contrast that with grep. You can do `if grep -q foo` or `if grep -qv foo`, you can do `if "foo" == "$(grep foo)"`, etc. Much more versatile and easy to use. Then there's apps that report to stderr that some argument isn't used but then also exits with success without doing things. Then there's similar apps that do the same thing but... exits after also doing things. Ugh. After some time you get to learn to test your apps before you write up scripts around them. That's a good thing though, it means that you know how to mix together a diverse toolset.