set -e: Exit on error. Very useful, but notoriously weird with edge cases (especially inside conditionals like if statements, while loops, and pipelines). Don’t rely on it blindly as it can create false confidence. (Pro-tip: consider set -euo pipefail for a more robust safety net, but learn its caveats first.)
while I appreciate that the author mentions how weird this is, nobody is going to learn all the caveats correctly. Don’t use set -e. Don’t use set -e. Don’t use set -e. It’s a shit ass broken ass fucked feature that half of nobody understands well. Here’s a great wiki page explaining why it’s trash: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
People like Go, and Go requires you to manually and stupidly handle every possible error case. Why not do the same for shell? It’s really quite easy:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echoerr() { echo "$@" 1>&2; }
die() {
message="$1"; shift
exit_code="${1:-1}"
echoerr "$message"
exit "$exit_code"
}
temp_dir="$HOME/tmp"
mkdir -p "$temp_dir" || die "Failed to make persistent temporary dir $temp_dir"
lc_dir="$(mktemp -d -p "$temp_dir")" || die "Failed to make target dir in $temp_dir"
Look at that, descriptive error messages! And it doesn’t depend on a shell feature that is inconsistent between versions with no good documentation about all of the fucked up caveats.
Does this mean that they won’t have to be packaged in the most infuriating way possible? Current 2032 (and other coin cell) battery packaging is a nightmare to get into and is so fucking wasteful of plastic. Kids just won’t stop eating these fucking batteries, so the solution was to fucking entomb them in HIPS or PVC or whatever the fuck.