You don't need to copy those boilerplate functions everywhere you go. Bash and others have "set -e" which will make the overall script exit with an error if on

You don't need to copy those boilerplate functions everywhere you go. Bash and others have "set -e" which will make the overall script exit with an error if one of its commands returns an error. Also useful is "set -u" to detect the use of unset variables (though some people write shell scripts which depend on those, so it's not as universally applicable). Try writing "set -eu" as the first line of your shell scripts. It's sort of like compiling with "-Wall -Werror"--not the default but perhaps should have been.