On bash with --enable-minimal-config, as of version 4.3 (as far as I can tell), there appears to be a bug with the exit status on returning from subshells. Apparently the exit status of the subshell is not given to the main shell.
On bash-4.4 with --enable-minimal-config: $ (false);echo $? 0 $ (false);echo $? 0 $ (false);echo $? 0 On bash-4.4 with --enable-minimal-config --enable-alias: $ (false);echo $? 1 $ (false);echo $? 0 $ (false);echo $? 0 Note the difference in behaviour: if --enable-alias is used it acts correctly but only once. On bash-4.3 the behaviour is identical. bash-4.2 doesn't compile on my system so I was unable to test it. On bash-4.1 and bash-4.0 the bug is not present. Testing was done on Mac OS X 10.11.6. Thanks, - Martijn
