Recently I’ve been writing a bunch of bash scripts for various things. As some up-front safety checks I’ve taken to opening every script with the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

[[ "$TRACE" ]] && set -o xtrace
set -o errexit
set -o nounset
set -o pipefail
set -o noclobber

Other things I’m also trying to be good about doing:

• using readonly when declaring variables which shouldn’t be mutated
• Trapping errors using an error function, and cleaning up anything temporary in there

And some useful reading I ran across in my quest to level up bash-scripts:

• Bash Exit Traps
• Use the unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Yes, two posts from http://redsymbol.net/. Well worth reading.)
• Bash scripting quirks & safety tips
• Bash hackers wiki