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

If a subshell isn't an option (say you need to do something crazy like set a variable) then you can just check every single command that might fail and deal with it by appending || return $?. This causes the function to return the error code on failure.

It's ugly, but it works

#!/bin/sh
set -e

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

if ! my_function; then
    echo "dealing with the problem"
fi

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

gives

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