It probably depends on if the cleanup is safe to run without its setup. For "rm -f", that's true so the trap probably should be first in that case. If you have

It probably depends on if the cleanup is safe to run without its setup. For "rm -f", that's true so the trap probably should be first in that case. If you have to worry about strict dependency ordering, trapping first may not be possible. Of course, the better solution to those situations is to make the cleanup command idempotent ... (that said, any order is much better than the unfortunately-common style of simply ignoring errors and exceptions.)