Bash is a great programming environment, in the same sense that JavaScript is a great programming language. That is, it's a pretty terrible design by any reasonable modern standard, but it's got reach. When it comes to automating servers, there are still many tasks for which Bash is hard to beat.

Bash does not support modern concepts like exceptions, but it does have some facilities for managing errors. The most important one is probably to not silently ignore errors. It's great that Bash supports that; it's unfortunate that it's turned off by default. In most installations, the following runs to completion:

$ cat script.sh
does-not-exist
echo "hello"
$ bash script.sh
script.sh: line 1: does-not-exist: command not found
hello
$ echo $?
0

Not only did execution not stop on the error, but the script has overall signalled successful completion. This is in most cases a huge deal: Bash generally deals with killing processes and deleting files, so you absolutely do not want to keep going in the presence of unexpected errors. This doesn't really seem like a big deal in this silly example, but what about the following?

do-backup
send-email "admin@example.org" "Backup completed, you can sleep soundly."

Believing you have backups when you actually don't can be a Very Bad Thing™.

There is a simple fix for this issue. It's far from covering all of the Bash safety issues, but it does go a long way: the -e flag. Behold:

$ cat script.sh
does-not-exist
echo "hello"
$ bash -e script.sh
script.sh: line 1: does-not-exist: command not found
$ echo $?
127
$

This is a lot better. There is still one small wrinkle, though: you have to remember to put that -e on your Bash invocation every single time. Moreover, if you share that script with someone else, they also need to know to set that flag.

Fortunately, Bash has a solution for this too: you can set such flags at any point from the Bash script itself, and it will turn the flag on from that point on. So this should really be the first thing you do in every Bash script.

$ cat script.sh
set -e
does-not-exist
echo "hello"
$ bash script.sh
script.sh: line 1: does-not-exist: command not found
$ echo $?
127
$