Bash set builtin- pipefail

author: admin
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layout: post

tags: bash, linux

By default, if you pipe commands, the exit status reported will be the one of the last command.

Example:

ls -l test.txt | mail -s "test" example@example.org

If test.txt doesn’t exist, the exit status would still be 0 because the mail command was successful.

If you want to change that behavior, you should enable the pipefail builtin:

> false
> echo $?
1
> true
> echo $?
0
> false | true
> echo $?
0
> set -o pipefail
> false | true
> echo $?
1