How do I get the effect and usefulness of “set -e” inside a shell function?

Question

set -e (or a script starting with #!/bin/sh -e) is extremely useful to automatically bomb out if there is a problem. It saves me having to error ch

Answer 1

You may directly use a subshell as your function definition and set it to exit immediately with set -e. This would limit the scope of set -e to the function subshell only and would later avoid switching between set +e and set -e.

In addition, you can use a variable assignment in the if test and then echo the result in an additional else statement.

# use subshell for function definition
f() (
   set -exo pipefail
   echo a
   false
   echo Should NOT get HERE
   exit 0
)

# next line also works for non-subshell function given by agsamek above
#if ret="$( set -e && f )" ; then 
if ret="$( f )" ; then
   true
else
   echo "$ret"
fi

# prints
# ++ echo a
# ++ false
# a