Bash Script Best Practices I Enforce on Every Project
Bash scripts grow from quick one-liners into unmaintainable messes unless you set guardrails. Here are the practices I enforce on every script. Bash scripts have a tendency to start as quick one-liners and grow into unmaintainable messes. I have inherited scripts that were hundreds of lines long with no error handling, no quoting, and no way to tell what they actually did when something went wrong. After rewriting too many of these, I adopted a set of practices that I enforce on every bash script I write or review. They cost nothing to apply and prevent the most common classes of bugs. The Mandatory Header Every script I write starts with the same three lines. The shebang specifies bash explicitly rather than sh, because I use bash-specific features like [[ ]] and arrays. The set -euo pipefail line enables three safety options that catch most bugs automatically. #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail IFS=$'\ \t' The -e flag exits immediately if any command fails. Without it, a script continues after errors, which is the source of countless silent failures where a later command runs on bad data from an earlier failure. The -u…