This is, in my opinion, REALLY bad practice. Never use potentially dangerous commands (rm -f) to avoid the prospect of an error! Instead, one should practice

This is, in my opinion, REALLY bad practice. Never use potentially dangerous commands (rm -f) to avoid the prospect of an error! Instead, one should practice good error handling. For some scripts and depending on the audience "set -e" may be sufficient. But usually always better: rm file.txt || echo "Warning: Deleting file.txt failed, continuing anyway." Or, for longer shell scripts, I always include a little function that deals with error handling. You can call it in the same way: rm file.txt || errorHandler("ignore") As shown above, the function can be built to take various parameters, and can then for instance abort or ignore the error. It can also take care of updating a log file. Somewhat related, I do logging in shell scripts with a function, too: rm file.txt && log("info", "file successfully deleted") That way, I only need to write the code that writes log lines with nice formating and timestamps and such once. Somewhat related, one can trap various signals in a shell script, and call a bash function when they happen. Thus, one can trap SIGEXIT and call a cleanup function that triggers on Ctrl-C, and I'm almost certain (sorry, can't test right now) one can also trap SIGERR and catch errors in a shell script nicely (though I'm not sure if that also goes for external commands inside said shell script).