Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:45:41 -0600
From: Stan Marsh <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| This paragraph is obviously nonsense, taken at face value.
You're welcome to your opinion, but I meant what I said.
| But in fact, properly interpreting it depends on two variables:
|
| 1) Are we talking about using -e as your primary (i.e., only)
| method of error handling or are we talking about using it as "last
| resort" - a handler for the truly unexpected?
That actually makes no difference. Using -e at all, except in very
specialised scripts (I mean the way they are written, not what they do)
is almost always going to cause more problems than it solves.
| 2) Are we operating in the world of actual reality, or is our
| orientation that of lecturing to newbies?
There's certainly a bunch of the latter, but for this, the vast
majority of people who write sh code are newbies. There are
certainly people who actually understand -e (though even they can
sometimes be surprised by how it often doesn't do what was planned)
but they are a fairly small group.
As a general rule, unless you have written a shell, or worked on the
code for one for years, you probably don't really understand -e (many
people believe they do, most of them are wrong.)
Just don't use it. Really, just don't.
If you need a shell option to help make your code safer, by all
means, turn on -u. That one works in a predictable, and fairly
easy to understand, way (it isn't an alternative to -e of course,
there isn't one of those).
kre
