Bash, the good path

• set -o errexit Errors will not stop the execution unless this set is applied.

• Use set -o nounset, this will make any expansions of unset variables as error. This will protect you against unset variables.

• Using ? expansion can protect you against unset or empty variables. This will output an error message if empty/unset and treat expansion as an error. rm -rf "${build:?Error, variable is empty or unset}

• set -f Disable filename expansion (globbing) upon seeing *, ?, etc. Don't use this if you rely on globbing.

• set -o pipefail causes a pipeline (for example, curl -s https://yahoo.fr/ | grep yahoo) to produce a failure return code if any command returns an error. Normally, pipelines only return a failure if the last command returns an error.

• Whenever you pass a variable to a command, you should probably quote it. Otherwise, the shell will perform word-splitting and globbing, which is likely not what you want.

Testing

• https://github.com/sstephenson/bats

Linting

• https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

• https://google.github.io/styleguide/shell.xml

Resources

• https://github.com/awesome-lists/awesome-bash

• https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls

• About using TCL instead of bash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14325048

• The POSIX Shell And Utilities http://shellhaters.org/