the people writing it are doing it for themselves probably. i wouldn’t expect it to survive a code review. the necessity of using esoteric bash features or syntax is a pretty good smell that you should be using something else imo.
replydifferent strokes of course.
This question seems to pop up all over the place, so I took some time to answer it here:
replyhttps://refp.se/articles/your-shell-and-the-magic-colon#why-...
I believe you missed a semicolon after `exit 1` and before `}`. `}` closes the opening `{` only at the start of a command (POSIX rules; don't remember now if bash recognizes it when it's just a command argument).
replyI'm just too used to how parsing works in Zsh. For bash and sh, there is indeed should be a semicolon.
replyIn this specific case, echo can't fail to there's no need for any of that:
reply [ -z "$1" ] && echo "fail" >&2 && exit 1Echo will fail here when stderr is closed. For example when the caller of the script pipes stderr to another command and that command exits.
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