Discussion: Writing shell scripts that fail safely
Entries
The advice to rewrite scripts over a certain size in a real language deserves a caveat: the rewrite often introduces dependencies (a runtime, packages) into environments where the shell was the only thing guaranteed to exist — containers, rescue systems, CI images. A carefully written shell script with ShellCheck is sometimes the more portable and more reviewable artifact. The threshold should be about complexity of control flow and data handling, not line count.
One practical detail: `set -e` does not fire inside a command that is part of an `if`, `&&`, `||` or a pipeline element other than the last, which surprises people who expect it to catch every failure. ShellCheck (a static analyser) flags most of the quoting and word-splitting mistakes described here and can run in CI; it is the cheapest way to make the checklist enforceable.
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