Safer bash scripts

Safer bash scripts with ‘set -euxo pipefail’

set -o errexit
set -e

The -e option will cause a bash script to exit immediately when a command fails. This is generally a vast improvement upon the default behavior where the script just ignores the failing command and continues with the next line. This option is also smart enough to not react on failing commands that are part of conditional statements. Moreover, you can append a command with || true for those rare cases where you don’t want a failing command to trigger an immediate exit.

set -o errtrace

Exit on error inside any functions or subshells

set -o pipefail

The bash shell normally only looks at the exit code of the last command of a pipeline. This behavior is not ideal as it causes the -e option to only be able to act on the exit code of a pipeline’s last command. This is where -o pipefail comes in. This particular option sets the exit code of a pipeline to that of the rightmost command to exit with a non-zero status, or to zero if all commands of the pipeline exit successfully.

set -u set -o nounset

This option causes the bash shell to treat unset variables as an error and exit immediately. Unset variables are a common cause of bugs in shell scripts, so having unset variables cause an immediate exit is often highly desirable behavior.

set -x set -o xtrace

The -x option causes bash to print each command before executing it. This can be a great help when trying to debug a bash script failure. Note that arguments get expanded before a command gets printed, which will cause our logs to contain the actual argument values that were present at the time of execution!