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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> They have inherited the second biggest mistake of shellscripts; Requiring the user to manually check $? after each command.

This isn’t true for Ruby nor shell scripts. In Ruby you have `system` or `Open3`. In shell scripts you:

  if my_command
  then
    on_success
  else
    on_failure
  fi

Shellcheck even warns you of that.

You’re checking the return value of the command here. Do you wrap all calls in an if?

I believe the author was talking about set -e (often used with -o pipefail), so that any unhandled error simply exits the script.

> Do you wrap all calls in an if?

I don’t need to check the exit status of every command.

> I believe the author was talking about set -e (often used with -o pipefail), so that any unhandled error simply exits the script.

I have no idea how you could get that impression from the section I quoted.

How would setting one option once at the top of the script mean “Requiring the user to manually check $? after each command”?