> You just wanted to print a warning if the directory doesn't exist. That code prints a warning if the directory does exist, actually ("-d FILE FILE exists an

> You just wanted to print a warning if the directory doesn't exist. That code prints a warning if the directory does exist, actually ("-d FILE FILE exists and is a directory"). Did you mean something like: test -e outfile && echo "trying to overwrite preexisting outfile" > You didn't want the function to fail. Uh, I kind of do, actually? If I wanted to discard the exit status I'd write: test -e outfile && echo "trying to overwrite preexisting outfile" || true; This is awkward, and suggests a proper if-then operator (perl-6-style `??` collides with globbing, but maybe `&?`?), but it's better then having something like: mkfoo -o foo && cp -T foo otherfoo do-something foo bar mostly-silently mix old and new data together because mkfoo failed and the error code was swallowed. > So there's no way for shell to really know what you want. Yep, and if we have to pick one problem, things failing completely in a obvious and also easily-fixable way is usually a much less awful problem to have than silently corrupting data and state, especially when you've opted-in to a mechanism (like errexit) specifically designed to do the former.