bash zcat head causes pipefail?

Question

set -eu 
VAR=$(zcat file.gz  |  head -n 12)

works fine

set -eu   -o pipefail
VAR=$(zcat file.gz  |  head -n 12)

c

Answer 1

Alternatively, you can use

zcat file.gz  | awk '(NR<=12)'

The price is that you need to go through all the zcat, no early stop based on the lines you specified.