Why do you find $PIPESTATUS useful? It is in theory, but in practice I've never found a situation where I wouldn't just want to fail the whole pipe if one part

Why do you find $PIPESTATUS useful? It is in theory, but in practice I've never found a situation where I wouldn't just want to fail the whole pipe if one part of it failed, which is what "set -o pipefail" is for. It's good practice to start your scripts with "set -euo pipefail" and then list exceptions to that scoped with "set +..." as needed. That's the "unofficial bash strict mode"[1]. I don't use the IFS recommendation in that article. I prefer to just keep one set of shell inanities in my head, and being used to the non-default IFS behavior doesn't help when debugging other people's shellscripts. 1. http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/ http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/