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 will need to call your function in a sub shell (inside brackets ()) to achieve this.

I think you want to write your script like this:

#!/bin/sh -e

my_function() {
    echo "the following command could fail:"
    false
    echo "this is after the command that fails"
}

(my_function)

if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
    echo "dealing with the problem"
fi

echo "run this all the time regardless of the success of my_function"

Then the output is (as desired):

the following command could fail:
dealing with the problem
run this all the time regardless of the success of my_function